Processing of text containing artificial inclusion relations

Mynatt, Barbee T.; Smith, Kirk H.

doi:10.3758/bf03196944

Cited by 12 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Another way of looking at the data from this experiment is in terms of the strategies that subjects adopted (classified according to the criteria suggested by Mynatt & Smith, 1979). The results illustrate quite forcibly the points that have already emerged: strategies involving symmetry were more frequent than those involving asymmetry, and strategies involving transitivity were more frequent than those involving intransitivity.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Potts (1978) suggested that set inclusions were misinterpreted as similarity relationships; Mynatt and Smith (1979) suggested that they cued in an inappropriate processing schema; and Newstead and Griggs (1984) argued that erCopyright 1986 Psychonomic Society, Inc. rors might result from the quantifier all being interpreted fuzzily and thus allowing the occasional exception. None of these interpretational explanations has attracted widespread support, so it seems reasonable to explore in more detail the explanation in terms of response bias.…”

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Response bias in relational reasoning

Newstead

Pollard

Griggs

1986

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

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In this study, we investigated the possibility that a response bias might be responsible for the typical pattern of responding observed when people reason about artificial relationships, especially set inclusions. Experiment 1 provided strong evidence for the proposed bias, since subjects tended to respond as if an unspecified relationship were symmetrical and increasingly intransitive over inferential distance. However, Experiment 2, using extended syllogisms, showed that not all relationships lead to such responding. Although the majority of the quantified relationships were responded to as if they were symmetrical, most were also regarded as transitive. Thus, the response bias idea, although of some interest, cannot provide a complete explanation of performance on these tasks.In the literature on reasoning, there is a longstanding dispute between the rationalists and nonrationalists. The rationalists believe that reasoning is inherently logical and that errors can be explained by misinterpretation of the premises, whereas the nonrationalists believe that errors can be attributed to nonlogical response biases.In the present paper, we attempt to make a contribution to this dispute by exploring the existence of a nonlogical response bias that may explain performance on a variety of reasoning tasks involving artificial relationships. The bias in question is a tendency to assume that any relationship is (1) symmetrical and (2) increasingly intransitive over inferential distance. This can be illustrated best by considering the schematic relationship A-B, B-C, C-D, where A, B, C, and D are entities and "-" depicts any relationship connecting them. To say that the relationship is symmetrical means that subjects will assume that the relationship holds both ways, so that, for example, B-A is true as well as A-B. To say that the relationship is intransitive implies that transitive inferences will not tend to be accepted as true: Subjects will tend not to accept conclusions such as A-C or B-D. To say that the relationship is increasingly intransitive over inferential distance means that as the number of steps required to make a transitive inference increases, subjects will be less likely to accept the inference. Thus, in the above example, A-D would be less likely to be accepted than A-C or B-D.Although such a bias has not been discussed previously in the literature, there is in fact a range of evidence consistent with it. One line of evidence comes from Tsal (1977), who gave subjects problems involving a relationThe authors thank Ray Burke for his assistance in generating the experimenta materials for Experiment 2. Requests for reprints should be sent to S. E. Newstead. Department of Psychology. Plymouth Polytechnic. Drake Circus. Plymouth. Devon PL4 8AA, England.ship among four people, but the actual nature of the relationship was not specified (it was denoted by a short line, as in the schematic example above). The majority of subjects (72 %) assumed that the relationship was symmetrical, and 76% assumed it was intran...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 92%

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confidence: 99%

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Response bias in relational reasoning

Newstead

Pollard

Griggs

1986

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

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“…Subsequent experimental testing of this paradigm has confirmed the existence of these two phenomena (Carroll & Kammann, 1977;Griggs, 1976;Griggs & Osterman, 1980;Griggs & Warner, 1982;Mynatt & Smith, 1979;Newstead & Griggs, 1984;Newstead, Keeble, & Manktelow, 1985;Potts, 1976) despite the fact that considerable interparticipant differences have been identified (Griggs & Osterman, 1980;Mynatt & Smith, 1979). Experimenters have proposed two interpretations designed to account for the poor performance displayed in hierarchical inclusion tasks.…”

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confidence: 88%

Transitive inferences from set-inclusion relations and working memory.

Barrouillet

1996

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Research into the evaluation of transitive inferences from inclusion relations has shown, though there are important intersubject differences, that participants tend to consider the inclusion relation to be symmetrical and that they fail to assume transitivity: the level of correct responses falls for true inferences and increases for false inferences, the greater the number of inferential steps involved (Truth x Distance interaction). This article puts forth a cognitive load hypothesis to account both for the interaction and for intersubject differences. It was shown that the cognitive load associated with the calculation of the inferences predicted error rates and accounted for the Truth x Distance interaction. Moreover, the performances were correlated with participants' working memory span. Research on deductive reasoning in adults has often led to the conclusion that human reasoning does not conform to the rules of logic and is subject to multiple biases (Evans, 1982, 1989). As pointed out by Johnson-Laird and Byrne (1991), "People are rational in principle, but fallible in practice" (p. 19). Numerous theories of reasoning suggest that the limitation of the processing capacities of human participants represents a major source of error (e.g., Braine, 1990; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991; Rips, 1983). The purpose of this article is to determine the extent to which the errors observed in a transitive inference evaluation task known for its difficulty (the set-inclusion task) can be explained in terms of a problem of cognitive load and whether interparticipant differences are due, at least in part, to differences in processing capacity. The most frequently studied field has been that of the comprehension of the conditional (if p then q), in particular using Wason's (1966, 1968) selection task. Although some models point to the implementation of rules of inference

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“…Potts (1978) suggested that set inclusions are incorrectly treated as similarity relations, which are nontransitive and convertible; however, he provided no persuasive argument as to why set inclusions should be so misinterpreted. Mynatt and Smith (1979) claimed that the errors are due to inappropriate schema cuing; they claimed that subjects can process inclusions appropriately, for example, if these involve geographical or topographical inclusions (e.g., A is in B). However, the normal set inclusion using the quantifier all leads to inappropriate processing, although the authors gave no sound reason why this should occur.…”

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confidence: 99%

Children’s performance on set-inclusion and linear-ordering relationships

Newstead

Keeble²,

Manktelow

1985

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

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Children between the ages of 6 and 16 years were presented with set-inclusion and linearordering relationships embedded in text. On the set-inclusion task, children of all age groups performed similarly to adult subjects; that is, there was an interaction between truth and distance. Hence, children, like adults, treated the relationship as if it were convertible and nontransitive, both of which can be regarded as logical errors. It was suggested that this pattern of results may result from a basic response bias. On the linear-ordering task, young children had great difficulty both in remembering the material and in drawing the appropriate inferences. It was concluded that children may acquire transitivity later on verbally presented tasks than on visually presented ones. In the reasoning literature, there is a paradox in the performance of adult subjects on linear-ordering and setinclusion tasks. People have no difficulty with linearordering tasks, correctly drawing the permitted transitive inferences. With set inclusions, however, people tend not to draw transitive inferences, and performance in general is poor. In this paper, we try to throw light on this paradox by examining developmental trends in performance on the two tasks. A study by Potts (1974) is a fairly typical one using linear orderings. Subjects were presented with a verbal passage containing the information A > B > C > D, where> indicates a relationship such as "better than" and the letters represent entities. Subjects were then presented with true-false test items, some of which involved transitive inferences (e.g., A > D). Subjects had no difficulty with such test items, and, indeed, performance actually tended to be superior on inferential items; hence, subjects could draw transitive inferences with consummate ease. A typical set-inclusion task is that of Griggs (1976). Subjects were presented with passages containing the information that All As are Bs, All Bs are Cs, All Cs are Ds. When presented with true-false test items, many subjects did not draw the permitted transitive inferences (e.g., All As are Ds). In fact, the greater the inferential distance Part of this research was carried out while the first author was on sabbatical leave at the University of Florida. The authors would like to thank Rich Griggs for his advice and comments and Julia Billington for her help in running Experiment 3. The first author's mailing address is:

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Processing of text containing artificial inclusion relations

Cited by 12 publications

References 16 publications

Response bias in relational reasoning

Response bias in relational reasoning

Transitive inferences from set-inclusion relations and working memory.

Children’s performance on set-inclusion and linear-ordering relationships

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