Research suggests that causal judgment is influenced primarily by counterfactual or covariational reasoning. In contrast, the author of this article develops judgment dissociation theory (JDT), which predicts that these types of reasoning differ in function and can lead to divergent judgments. The actuality principle proposes that causal selections focus on antecedents that are sufficient to generate the actual outcome. The substitution principle proposes that ad hoc categorization plays a key role in counterfactual and covariational reasoning such that counterfactual selections focus on antecedents that would have been sufficient to prevent the outcome or something like it and covariational selections focus on antecedents that yield the largest increase in the probability of the outcome or something like it. The findings of 4 experiments support JDT but not the competing counterfactual and covariational accounts. If causation is the cement of the universe, as the philosopher David Hume (1740/1938) put it, then it is fair to say that causal knowledge is the cement that binds together each person’s representational universe. Causal reasoning—the process that generates this glue—confers many functional advantages. In virtually every sphere of human interest, our abilities to learn and categorize

Simple belief-revision tasks were defined by a giving subjects a conditional premise, (p-->q), a categorical premise, (p, for a modus-ponens belief-set, or ~q, for a modus tollens belief-se0, and the associated inference (q or ~p, respectively). "New" information contradicted the initial inference (~q or p, respectively). Subjects indicated their degree of belief in the conditional premise and the categorical premise, given the contradiction. Results

rather 'the experimenter knows how to find the answer and she wants to know whether I know how to find it1. The interpretation of the question is determined in part and revealed by

Two competing theories of processing of conditionals (if–then) were tested. Syntactic theories posit that people only draw inferences conforming to the logically valid modus ponens (MP) schema. Mental models theories predict that people draw MP and invalid affirming-the-consequent (AC) inferences. Three experiments tested these predictions. Participants read short stories that conformed to either the MP or AC form but without conclusions, and they completed either priming or recognition tasks. Results indicate that both MP and AC inferences occur during discourse processing: MP and AC premise forms prime their respective conclusions, participants erroneously judged that they had read the conclusions to MP and AC arguments, and AC inferences did not stem from a biconditional interpretation of conditionals. Findings support mental models theories. The logical connective if...then, often used to express conditional statements, is ubiquitous in human discourse. Its role is particularly prominent in comprehension and reasoning. If...then is hypothesized to play an important role in language comprehension by enhancing the integration of discourse into a coherent representation (e.g., Braine, 1990; Halliday & Hasan, 1976) and by

This study discusses belief-change as the problem of deciding which previously-accepted belief, or premise, to abandon, when an inference from an initial belief set is subsequently contradicted. The data concern how "disbelieving" a previously-accepted conditional premise is realized as a particular modification to that premise. The types of revisions that are made are influenced by the kind of knowledge expressed in the conditional. The results and the broader issues of beliefrevision are related to other concerns that have emerged in the literature on propositional inference, such as the reported reluctance of people to make simple valid modus ponens inferences in some circumstances and the general interest in incorporating subjective belief into accounts of deductive inference.

Some belief revision theories appeal to the notion of epistemic entrenchment as a guide to choosing among alternative ways of removing inconsistency that new information may cause with existing beliefs. While belief revision theorists may not be interested in natural language uses of conditionals per se, the appeal to epistemic entrenchment because certain kinds of knowledge (e.g., physical laws) are expressed in conditional form opens the door to a more careful consideration of whether the syntactic form itself serves as a useful cue, even in the mind of the researcher, for epistemic entrenchment principles. This study determines whether there is any empirical support for the notion that the type of knowledge expressed in a statement can serve as the basis for epistemic entrenchment principles. Four types of knowledge---promises, causal relationships, familiar definitions and unfamiliar definitions---were expressed in a common syntactic if p then q form. A belief revision task was giv...

This study presents evidence for the role of working memory (WM) capacity in the retrieval and inhibition of counterexamples (alternatives and disablers) during everyday conditional reasoning. A total of 292 university students were given a measure of WMcapacity and a reasoning task with everyday, causal conditionals. Results show that the acceptance ratings of the logically valid Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens inferences follow a quadratic, U-shaped trend in function of WM-capacity, while acceptance ratings of the logically invalid Affirmation of the Consequent and Denial of the Antecedent inferences follow a negative linear trend. Findings support the claim that participants highest in WM-capacity spontaneously inhibit the disabler retrieval process during everyday reasoning.

this paper we show that such inferred semantic relations between objects help people decide when and how to apply their abstract formal knowledge of arithmetic. Specifically, we asked college students to construct simple addition or division word problems for various pairs of object sets we provided. We found that they aligned the mathematical relations between arguments of arithmetic operations with the semantic relations that were evoked by the given pairs of object sets. For example, division involves an asymmetric mathematical relation between dividend and divisor (a/b b/ a). Students who completed our mathematical task applied this asymmetric operation to object sets that readily evoked functionally asymmetric semantic relations (e.g., a apples and b baskets), but refrained from dividing object sets that did not evoke functionally asymmetric relations (e.g., a apples and b oranges). Instead, they usually related such functionally symmetric sets with the mathematically symmetric operation of addition (a 1 b 5 b 1 a)

The present study is part of recent attempts to specify the characteristics of the counterexample retrieval process during causal conditional reasoning. The study tried to pinpoint whether the retrieval of stored counterexamples (alternative causes and disabling conditions) for a causal conditional is completely automatic in nature or whether the search process also demands executive working memory (WM) resources. In Experiment 1, participants were presented a counterexample generation task and a measure of WM-capacity. We found a positive relation between search efficiency, as measured by the number of generated counterexamples in limited time, and WM-capacity. Experiment 2 examined the effects of a secondary WM-load on the retrieval performance. As predicted, burdening WM with an attention demanding secondary task decreased the retrieval efficiency. Both low and high spans were affected by the WM-load but load effects were less pronounced for the most strongly associated counterexamples. Findings established that in addition to an automatic search component, the counterexample retrieval draws on WM-resources.

We present an integrated model for the understanding of and the reasoning from conditional statements. Central assumptions from several approaches are integrated into a causal path model. According to the model, the cognitive availability of exceptions to a conditional reduces the subjective conditional probability of the consequent, given the antecedent. This conditional probability determines people’s degree of belief in the conditional, which in turn affects their willingness to accept logically valid inferences. In addition to this indirect pathway, the model contains a direct pathway: Availability of exceptional situations directly reduces the endorsement of valid inferences. We tested the integrated model with three experiments using conditional statements embedded in pseudonaturalistic cover stories. An explicitly mentioned causal link between antecedent and consequent was either present (causal conditionals) or absent (arbitrary conditionals). The model was supported for the causal but not for the arbitrary conditional statements. In this paper we propose an integrated model of understanding of and reasoning from causal and noncausal conditionals. We integrate central assumptions from approaches to conditional reasoning with causal statements (Cummins, 1995; Thompson, 1994) with probabilistic