Bacon Alison M, Handley Simon J, McDonald Emma L
Centre for Thinking and Language, School of Psychology, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK.
Br J Psychol. 2007 Feb;98(Pt 1):79-92. doi: 10.1348/000712606X103987.
Bacon, Handley, and Newstead (2003, 2004), have presented evidence for individual differences in reasoning strategies, with most people seeming to represent and manipulate problem information using either a verbal or a spatial strategy. There is also evidence that individuals with dyslexia are inclined to conceptualise information in a visuo-spatial, rather than a verbal, way (e.g. von Károlyi et al., 2003). If so, we might expect a higher proportion of individuals with dyslexia to be spatial reasoners, compared with individuals who do not have dyslexia. The study reported here directly compared strategies reported by these two groups of participants on a syllogistic reasoning task. Moreover, problem content was manipulated so that reasoning across concrete and abstract materials could be compared. The findings suggest that whilst most individuals without dyslexia use a verbal strategy, reasoners with dyslexia do tend to adopt a spatial approach, though their performance is impaired with visually concrete materials. However, when reasoning with more abstract content, they perform comparably with non-dyslexic controls. The paper discusses these results in the light of recent research which has suggested that visual images may impede reasoning, and considers how individuals with dyslexia may differ from other reasoners.
培根、汉德利和纽斯特德（2003年、2004年）提出了推理策略存在个体差异的证据，大多数人似乎使用语言或空间策略来表征和处理问题信息。也有证据表明，患有诵读困难症的个体倾向于以视觉空间而非语言的方式来概念化信息（例如，冯·卡罗伊等人，2003年）。如果是这样，我们可能会预期，与没有诵读困难症的个体相比，患有诵读困难症的个体中空间推理者的比例会更高。本文所报告的研究直接比较了这两组参与者在三段论推理任务中所报告的策略。此外，对问题内容进行了操控，以便能够比较在具体和抽象材料上的推理。研究结果表明，虽然大多数没有诵读困难症的个体使用语言策略，但患有诵读困难症的推理者确实倾向于采用空间方法，尽管他们在视觉具体材料上的表现会受损。然而，在对更抽象的内容进行推理时，他们的表现与没有诵读困难症的对照组相当。本文根据最近的研究讨论了这些结果，该研究表明视觉图像可能会妨碍推理，并探讨了患有诵读困难症的个体与其他推理者可能存在的差异。
