Department of Psychology, Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Psychol Res. 2021 Nov;85(8):3119-3133. doi: 10.1007/s00426-020-01460-8. Epub 2021 Jan 11.
Abductive reasoning describes the process of deriving an explanation from given observations. The theory of abductive reasoning (TAR; Johnson and Krems, Cognitive Science 25:903-939, 2001) assumes that when information is presented sequentially, new information is integrated into a mental representation, a situation model, the central data structure on which all reasoning processes are based. Because working memory capacity is limited, the question arises how reasoning might change with the amount of information that has to be processed in memory. Thus, we conducted an experiment (N = 34) in which we manipulated whether previous observation information and previously found explanations had to be retrieved from memory or were still visually present. Our results provide evidence that people experience differences in task difficulty when more information has to be retrieved from memory. This is also evident in changes in the mental representation as reflected by eye tracking measures. However, no differences are found between groups in the reasoning outcome. These findings suggest that individuals construct their situation model from both information in memory as well as external memory stores. The complexity of the model depends on the task: when memory demands are high, only relevant information is included. With this compensation strategy, people are able to achieve similar reasoning outcomes even when faced with tasks that are more difficult. This implies that people are able to adapt their strategy to the task in order to keep their reasoning successful.
溯因推理描述了从给定观察结果中推导出解释的过程。溯因推理理论（TAR；Johnson 和 Krems，Cognitive Science 25:903-939, 2001）假设当信息以序列方式呈现时，新信息会被整合到一个心理表征中，即情境模型，这是所有推理过程所基于的核心数据结构。由于工作记忆容量有限，因此出现了这样一个问题，即推理过程如何随着需要在记忆中处理的信息量的变化而变化。因此，我们进行了一项实验（N=34），在实验中我们操纵了先前的观察信息和先前找到的解释是必须从记忆中检索还是仍然在视觉上呈现。我们的研究结果提供了证据，表明当需要从记忆中检索更多信息时，人们在任务难度上会有所不同。这也反映在眼动追踪测量结果所反映的心理表征变化中。然而，在推理结果方面，各组之间没有发现差异。这些发现表明，个体从记忆中的信息以及外部记忆存储中构建他们的情境模型。模型的复杂性取决于任务：当记忆需求较高时，只包括相关信息。通过这种补偿策略，即使面对更困难的任务，人们也能够取得类似的推理结果。这意味着人们能够根据任务调整他们的策略，以保持推理的成功。
