CICPSI, Faculdade de Psicologia, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2020 Oct;73(10):1695-1702. doi: 10.1177/1747021820931499. Epub 2020 Jun 17.
Research on problem-solving, judgement, and decision making documents systematic reasoning errors. Such errors are often attributed to reasoning shortcomings, an inability to think properly. However, recent research suggests another cause for those errors: insufficient attention to the critical premises in a problem, resulting in miscomprehension, such that, even if a person is capable of reasoning properly, she will fail to solve the problem correctly if she is operating on wrong premises. The first study in this article provided further evidence for this comprehension account of reasoning errors: Performance on reasoning problems was found to relate to verbal comprehension on a separate task. This suggests that reasoning errors are in part due to lack of comprehension. The upside of this account is that it should be possible to improve reasoning performance by drawing attention to the critical premises. Three additional studies provided consistent evidence for this hypothesis, showing that the same participants who at first proved unable to solve certain problems correctly were able to overcome this inability and performed better when simple attention-capturing devices drew their attention to the critical premises.
研究表明，解决问题、判断和决策文件存在系统推理错误。这些错误通常归因于推理上的不足，无法正确思考。然而，最近的研究表明，这些错误还有另一个原因：对问题关键前提的关注不够，导致误解，即使一个人能够正确推理，如果她在错误的前提上运作，她也将无法正确解决问题。本文中的第一项研究进一步为这一理解推理错误的说法提供了证据：在独立任务上的言语理解与推理问题的表现相关。这表明推理错误部分归因于理解的缺乏。这个说法的好处是，通过关注关键前提，应该有可能提高推理能力。另外三项研究为这一假设提供了一致的证据，表明最初无法正确解决某些问题的相同参与者能够克服这种能力不足，当简单的注意力捕捉设备将他们的注意力吸引到关键前提上时，他们的表现更好。
