Deductive reasoning is widely regarded as an activity central to human intelligence, and as such has attracted an increasing amount of psychological study in recent years. In this first major survey of the field for over a decade, the authors provide a detailed and balanced review of all the main kinds of deductive reasoning task studied by psychologists. Topics covered include conditional and disjunctive reasoning, the Wason selection task, relational inference and reasoning with syllogisms and quantifiers. Throughout the review, a careful distinction is drawn between the main empirical...

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute, Athens, Greece, December 10-20, 1984

This collection of essays focuses on three reasoning problems devised by Peter Wason - the selection task, the 2-4-6 task, and the THOG problem - which have had a considerable influence since their invention.; The reasons why people make so many errors in these seemingly simple tasks are still not fully understood. A variety of different theoretical perspectives have been used in trying to explain performance. These include the mental models approach, the pragmatic reasoning approach, and the mental logic approach. This book contains chapters which discuss all these theories. Other chapters...