Psychology of Reasoning

The psychology of reasoning is the study of how people reason, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions. [Leighton, J. P. (2004). Defining and describing reason, in "The Nature of Reasoning" (eds Leighton, J. P. and Sternberg, R. J.) Cambridge University Press] It is at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, logic, and probability theory.

Research in this area addresses questions such as:

* How do people reason about sentences in natural language? The most famous example is Peter Wason's selection task, which tests how people reason about the conditional "if "P" then "Q". Other popular tasks include categorical syllogisms and various logic puzzles like Sudoku.
* Psychologically, what are the relationships between induction, deduction, abduction, and analogy?
* What are the appropriate competence models? What does it mean to be rational? Initially classical logic was chosen as a model. [See, e.g., Wason, P. C. (1966). "Reasoning", in Foss, B. M.: New horizons in psychology. Harmondsworth: Penguin.] Later researchers have opted for non-monotonic logic [Da Silva Neves, R., Bonnefon, J. F., & Raufaste, É. (2002). An empirical test for patterns of nonmonotonic inference. "Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence", 34, 107-130] [Stenning, K. & van Lambalgen, M. (2005). Semantic Interpretation as Computation in Nonmonotonic Logic: The Real Meaning of the Suppression Task. "Cognitive Science", 29, 919-960] and Bayesian probability [See, e.g., Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (2001) The probabilistic approach to human reasoning. "Trends in Cognitive Sciences", 5, 349-357] .
* How does reasoning relate to intelligence? [See, e.g., Stanovich, K. E. & West, R. F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? "Behavioral & Brain Sciences", 23, 645-726]
* How do various related factors such as linguistic pragmatics and emotion relate to the inferences people draw? [See, e.g., Noveck, I. A. (2004) Pragmatic Inferences Related to Logical Terms. In Noveck, I. A. & Sperber, D. (ed.), "Experimental Pragmatics", Palgrave Mcmillan] [Blanchette, I. & Richards, A. (2004). Reasoning about emotional and neutral materials. Is logic affected by emotion? "Psychological Science", 15, 745-75]
* What are the neural correlates of reasoning, often investigated using event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging? [See, e.g., Goel, V. (2005). Cognitive Neuroscience of Deductive Reasoning. In Holyoak, K. J. & Morrison, R. G. (ed.). "The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning", Cambridge University Press]

External Links

* [http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psyc/staff/academic/moaksford/londonreasoningworkshop London Reasoning Workshop]
* [http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/programmes/logiccc.html Logic in the Humanities, Social and Computational sciences (LogICCC)]

Notes