Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is "rule based " because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical content and variables and because its computations have the properties that are normally assigned to rules. The systems serve complementary functions and can simultaneously generate different solutions to a reasoning problem. The rule-based system can suppress the associative system but not completely inhibit it. The article reviews evidence in favor of the distinction and its characterization. One of the oldest conundrums in psychology is whether people are best conceived as parallel processors of information who operate along diffuse associative links or as analysts who operate by deliberate and sequential manipulation of internal representations. Are inferences drawn through a network of learned associative pathways or through application of a kind of "psychologic"

Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand. The author reviews evidence of such a bias in a variety of guises and gives examples of its operation in several practical contexts. Possible explanations are considered, and the question of its utility or disutility is discussed. When men wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into their service! (Mackay, 1852/ 1932, p. 552) Confirmation bias is perhaps the best known and most widely accepted notion of inferential error to come out of the literature on human reasoning. (Evans, 1989, p. 41) If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration. Many have written about this bias, and it appears to be sufficiently strong and pervasive that one is led to wonder whether the bias, by itself, might account for a significant fraction of the disputes, altercations, and misunderstandings that occur among individuals, groups, and nations. Confirmation bias has been used in the psychological literature to refer to a variety of phenomena. Here I take the term to represent a generic concept that subsumes several more specific ideas that connote the inappropriate bolstering of hypotheses or beliefs whose truth is in question.

this paper is to show that this misunderstanding of the nature of logic by these and other prominent programs of research into human reasoning, has led to an impoverishment of empirical investigation into what subjects are doing in the selection task and to a wholly unnecessary and damaging rift between logically based cognitive theories of natural language interpretation on the one hand, and psychological experimentation on reasoning on the other. We will show that when empirical exploration is based on an informed understanding of logically based cognitive theory, the evidence strongly suggests a nearly opposite evolutionary account of the relation between the emergence of human communication capacities and economic exchange, and that logical semantics already has accounts of context senstivity to o#er far in advance of mental models theory's new creations

This paper presents a computational approach to EmotionBased Decision-Making that models important aspects of emotional processing and integrates these with other models of perception, motivation, behavior, and motor control. A particular emphasis is placed on using some of the mechanisms of emotions as building blocks for the acquisition of emotional memories that serve as biasing signals during the process of making decisions and selecting actions. We have successfully followed this approach to develop and control several different autonomous agents, including both synthetic agents and physical robots.

Cosmides and Tooby (1996) increased performance using a frequency rather than probability frame on a problem known to elicit base-rate neglect. Analogously, Gigerenzer (1994) claimed that the conjunction fallacy disappears when formulated in terms of frequency rather than the more usual single-event probability. These authors conclude that a module or algorithm of mind exists that is able to compute with frequencies but not probabilities. The studies reported here found that base-rate neglect could also be reduced using a clearly stated single-event probability frame and by using a diagram that clarified the critical nested-set relations of the problem; that the frequency advantage could be eliminated in the conjunction fallacy by separating the critical statements so that their nested relation was opaque; and that the large effect of frequency framing on the two problems studied is not stable. Facilitation via frequency is a result of clarifying the probabilistic interpretation of the...

We review the various explanations that have been offered to account for subjects' behaviour in Wason's famous selection task. We argue that one element that is lacking is a good understanding of subjects' semantics for the key expressions involved, and an understanding of how this semantics is affected by the demands the task puts upon the subject's cognitive system. We make novel proposals in these terms for explaining the major content effects of deontic materials. Throughout we illustrate with excerpts from tutorial dialogues which motivate the kinds of analysis proposed. Our long term goal is an integration of the various insights about conditional reasoning on offer from different cognitive science methodologies. The purpose of this paper is to try to draw the attention of logicians and semanticists to this area, since we believe that empirical investigation of the cognitive processes involved could benefit from semantic analyses.

this article is whether children can incorporate this information into inductive reasoning

This thesis aims to develop a psychologically plausible account of concepts by integrating key insights from philosophy (on the metaphysical basis for concept possession) and psychology (on the mechanisms underlying concept acquisition). I adopt an approach known as informational atomism, developed by Jerry Fodor. Informational atomism is the conjunction of two theses: (i) informational semantics, according to which conceptual content is constituted exhaustively by nomological mind–world relations; and (ii) conceptual atomism, according to which (lexical) concepts have no internal structure. I argue that informational semantics needs to be supplemented by allowing content-constitutive rules of inference (“meaning postulates”). This is because the content of one important class of concepts, the logical terms, is not plausibly informational. And since, it is argued, no principled distinction can be drawn between logical concepts and the rest, the problem that this raises is a general one.

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

An important research tradition in the cognitive psychology of reasoning--called the heuristics and biases approach--has firmly established that people’s responses often deviate from the performance considered normative on many reasoning tasks. For example, people assess probabilities incorrectly, they display confirmation bias, they test hypotheses inefficiently, they violate the axioms of utility theory, they do not properly calibrate degrees of belief, they overproject their own opinions onto others, they display illogical framing effects, they uneconomically honor sunk costs, they allow prior knowledge to become implicated in deductive reasoning, and they display numerous other information processing biases (for summaries of the large literature, see