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Recent experiments on the processing of partially ordered information have found that people have problems in validly representing such information. A tendency to completely order this type of information has been observed. In the few cases in which reaction time data for comparative judgments about partially ordered information are available, the typical distance effect for complete orders (faster responses to nonadjacent than adjacent comparisons) has not been observed. However, elaborate training and testing procedures were used in these studies. The present experiments examined the processing of 7-and 12-term partial orders and employed simpler experimental procedures similar to those usually employed in complete order studies. The typical distance effect was not observed in any of the experiments. Relatively slow and highly variable reaction times, coupled with individual differences, in all three experiments indicated definite processing differences between partially and completely ordered information which could not be due to procedural factors.Many recent investigations of inferential reasoning have used sets of propositions that describe artificial linear ordering structures (e.g., Griggs & Shea, 1977;Potts, 1972Potts, , 1974Scholz & Potts, 1974). The termartificial is employed to distinguish this line of study from comparative judgment studies in which existing world knowledge is examined (e.g., Moyer, 1973;Paivio, 1975). In artificial ordering studies, the orders employed are experimenter defined. Subjects are presented with a set of sentences (usually in a paragraph) such as Ellen is smarter than Betty, Betty is smarter than Mary, and Mary is smarter than Karen. These sentences are studied, and then subjects are tested on the pairwise relation-This report is partially based on a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the master's degree at the University of Florida by the first author. Portions of this article were presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, May 1979, in Chicago, Illinois, and at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, November 1979, in Phoenix, Arizona. The authors thank Don Keen for invaluable programming assistance with these experiments.

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The typical distance effect for comparative judgments about ordered information (faster responses for nonadjacent comparisons than for adjacent comparisons) has not been found in recent experiments on processing highly complex 12·term partial orders. However. the rather complicated training and testing procedures used in these studies may have contributed to this failure to observe typical distance effects. The present experiment investigated the processing of a seven-term partial order in simpler experimental conditions similar to those employed in complete order studies. Results indicated that there were pronounced individual differences in encoding such information. Since only three subjects were judged to be using a valid representation of the partial order, no conclusions about the lack of distance effects in comparing partially ordered information could be drawn. Most subjects used memory representations that removed some or all of the indeterminacy in the partial order. It was concluded that most people do not have a p-econceived scheme for encoding partially ordered information. Although highly probable , it is not clear that this indeterminacy in partial order structures is responsible for the failure to observe distance effects in comparative judgment studies using such information. The experimental procedures employed in complete and partial order studies have been very different. The partial order studies have used very elaborate learning and training phases on the adjacent relations before any overall testing. In contrast, the procedures that have been employed in complete order studies are very simple. Subjects usually study either the adjacent relations in some prose frame or the actual complete order for a self-paced period of time. This study period is followed by a true -false or two-alternative forced-ehoice test on all the possible relations in the order .The present experiment investigated the processing of a smaller partial order under experimental conditions like those used in complete order studies. First , the partial order was presented in paragraph form , similar to that used in the initial complete order studies ofIn recent experiments using artificial (experimenterdefined) linear orders to study inferential reasoning abilities, subjects compared nonadjacent relations faster than adjacent relations (e.g., Pliske & Smith , 1979 ;Potts, 1974;Woocher, Glass, & Holyoak , 1978). Such a "distance effect" has occurred invariably for comparative judgments about linearly ordered information (see Potts , Banks, Kosslyn, Moyer, Riley, & Smith , 1978 , for a review of such effects) . However, two studies on the processing of 12-term partial orders have found either no distance effect (Moeser & Tarrant , 1977) or a reverse distance effect-faster responses for adjacents (Hayes-Roth & Hayes-Roth , 1975).Unlike complete linear orders , partial orders cannot be validly arranged in a linear array. Such orders must be represented in a physically multidirectional pattern. A sample partial order structure...