Schroyens Walter, Braem Senne
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2011 Feb;64(2):339-62. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2010.513734. Epub 2010 Nov 18.
All accounts of human reasoning (whether presented at the symbolic or subsymbolic level) have to reckon with the temporal organization of the human processing systems and the ephemeral nature of the representations it uses. We present three new empirical tests for the hypothesis that people commence the interpretational process by constructing a minimal initial representation. In the case of if A then C the initial representation captures the occurrence of the consequent, C, within the context of the antecedent, A. Conditional inference problems are created by a categorical premise that affirms or denies A or C. The initial representation allows an inference when the explicitly represented information matches (e.g., the categorical premise A affirms the antecedent "A") but not when it mismatches (e.g., "not-A" denies A). Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed that people tend to accept the conclusion that "nothing follows" for the denial problems, as indeed they do not have a determinate initial-model conclusion. Experiment 3 demonstrated the other way round that the effect of problem type (affirmation versus denial) is reduced when we impede the possibility of inferring a determinate conclusion on the basis of the initial representation of both the affirmation and the denial problems.
所有关于人类推理的描述（无论是在符号层面还是亚符号层面呈现）都必须考虑人类处理系统的时间组织以及该系统所使用表征的短暂性。我们针对“人们通过构建最小初始表征来开始解释过程”这一假设提出了三项新的实证检验。对于“如果A那么C”的情况，初始表征捕捉到了结果C在前提A的背景下的出现。条件推理问题由肯定或否定A或C的分类前提产生。当初始表征中明确表示的信息匹配时（例如，分类前提A肯定了前提“A”），初始表征允许进行推理，而当信息不匹配时（例如，“非A”否定A）则不然。实验1和实验2证实，对于否定问题，人们倾向于接受“没有结论可得出”这一结论，实际上他们确实没有一个确定的初始模型结论。实验3则反过来表明，当我们阻碍基于肯定和否定问题的初始表征推断出确定结论的可能性时，问题类型（肯定与否定）的影响就会减弱。
