Abstract: "Previous theories of human reasoning have all been based on what might be called the transduction paradigm: people encode the problem statement into an internal representation, reason using processes devoted specifically to that purpose, and then decode the result. The nature of the...

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1. Verfasser:	Polk, Thad A. (VerfasserIn)
Format:	Buch
Sprache:	English
Veröffentlicht:	Pittsburgh, PA School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon Univ. 1992
Schriftenreihe:	School of Computer Science <Pittsburgh, Pa.>: CMU-CS 1992,178
Schlagworte:	Verbal reasoning > Test Inference Reasoning Hochschulschrift
Zusammenfassung:	Abstract: "Previous theories of human reasoning have all been based on what might be called the transduction paradigm: people encode the problem statement into an internal representation, reason using processes devoted specifically to that purpose, and then decode the result. The nature of the intermediate reasoning process has been a major source of debate among cognitive psychologists. Some researchers have proposed that this process can best be characterized as the application of formal rules of inference while others have argued that it corresponds to a search for alternative mental models of the problem statement. I believe that the transduction paradigm itself is in error, at least for the standard tasks that have been used in studying human deductive reasoning My thesis is that most untrained subjects lack sophisticated reasoning-specific mechanisms for solving these tasks, and that, in their absence, they attempt to make progress by repeatedly applying linguistic processes to encode and reencode the problem statement. I refer to this type of behavior as verbal reasoning. The ideas of verbal reasoning arose out of VR, a computational model of human behavior on categorical syllogisms. It simulates human behavior on every variant of the syllogism task using purely linguistic processes. VR models all of the standard phenomena that have been discovered about syllogistic reasoning and makes a number of novel predictions that have been empirically confirmed Furthermore, using a set of individual difference parameters, it has been tailored to fit the behavior of individual subjects with an accuracy that rivals the test-retest reliability of the subjects themselves. Since VR only uses linguistic processes, it provides compelling evidence that human syllogistic reasoning can best be characterized as verbal reasoning. Finally, to show that verbal reasoning generalizes to other tasks, I analyzed Johnson-Laird and Byrne's recent attempt to provide accounts of behavior on all the standard deductive reasoning tasks
Beschreibung:	Zugl.: Pittsburgh, Pa., Univ., Diss., 1992
Beschreibung:	IV, 96 S.