An ongoing debate in the literature on human reasoning concerns whether or not the logical status (valid vs. invalid) of an argument can be intuitively detected. The finding that conclusions of logically valid inferences are liked more compared to conclusions of logically invalid ones--called the logic-liking effect--is one of the most prominent…

In describing how people generalize from observed samples of data to novel cases, theories of inductive inference have emphasized the learner's reliance on the contents of the sample. More recently, a growing body of literature suggests that different assumptions about how a data sample was generated can lead the learner to draw qualitatively…

The samples of evidence we use to make inferences in everyday and formal settings are often subject to selection biases. Two property induction experiments examined group and individual sensitivity to one type of selection bias: sampling frames - causal constraints that only allow certain types of instances to be sampled. Group data from both…

Much recent research and theorizing in the field of reasoning has been concerned with intuitive sensitivity to logical validity, such as the logic-brightness effect, in which logically valid arguments are judged to have a "brighter" typeface than invalid arguments. We propose and test a novel signal competition account of this…

Generalization of learning can arise from 2 distinct sources: failure to discriminate a novel test stimulus from the trained stimulus and active extrapolation from the trained stimulus to the test stimulus despite them being discriminable. We investigated these 2 processes in a predictive learning task by testing stimulus discriminability…

Four experiments examined the claims that people can intuitively assess the logical validity of arguments, and that qualitatively different reasoning processes drive intuitive and explicit validity assessments. In each study participants evaluated arguments varying in validity and believability using either deductive criteria (logic task) or via…

When asked to determine whether a syllogistic argument is deductively valid, people are influenced by their prior beliefs about the believability of the conclusion. Recently, two competing explanations for this belief bias effect have been proposed, each based on signal detection theory (SDT). Under a response bias explanation, people set more…

Two experiments tested whether a peak-shifted generalization gradient could be explained by the averaging of distinct gradients displayed in subgroups reporting different generalization rules. Across experiments using a causal judgment task (Experiment 1) and a fear conditioning paradigm (Experiment 2), we found a close concordance between…

Three-experiments examined the number of qualitatively different processing dimensions needed to account for inductive and deductive reasoning. In each study, participants were presented with arguments that varied in logical validity and consistency with background knowledge (believability), and evaluated them according to deductive criteria…

Four experiments examined the locus of impact of causal knowledge on consideration of alternative hypotheses in judgments under uncertainty. Two possible loci were examined; overcoming neglect of the alternative when developing a representation of a judgment problem and improving utilization of statistics associated with the alternative…

Two studies examined whether adults and children could learn to make context-dependent inferences about novel stimuli and the role of awareness of context cues in such learning. Participants were trained to match probes to targets on the basis of shape or color with the relevant dimension shifting according to item context. A selective induction…

Previous research has suggested that when feature inferences have to be made about an instance whose category membership is uncertain, feature-based inductive reasoning is used to the exclusion of category-based induction. These results contrast with the observation that people can and do use category-based induction when category membership is…