Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Reasoning”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,243 records · Page 69Linked to original sources
PubMed2002

The Spanish ser/estar distinction in bilingual children's reasoning about human psychological characteristics.

Children's reasoning about the stability of human psychological characteristics was investigated in relation to the obligatory distinction between the Spanish verb forms ser and estar (which convey different information about the stability of characteristics) and the corresponding English form to be. Participants (85 bilingual children, ages 6 to 10 years) were interviewed to determine (a) whether the ser/estar distinction is relevant to reasoning about the stability of human characteristics and (b) whether beliefs about the stability of psychological characteristics relate to differences in the use of ser and estar to describe and explain social events. Children treated ser and to be as more likely than estar to convey the stability of psychological characteristics. Children who tended to endorse stable views of psychological characteristics were especially likely to use the ser form in their descriptions and explanations.

Child↗
PubMed1997

What is a reasonable weight loss? Patients' expectations and evaluations of obesity treatment outcomes.

Expert panels and governmental guidelines now recommend that obese persons seek modest (i.e., "reasonable") reductions in body weight rather than striving for "ideal" weights. Little is known, however, about patients' views of what is a "reasonable" weight loss. This study assessed patients' goals, expectations, and evaluations of various outcomes before, during, and after 48 weeks of treatment. Before treatment, 60 obese women (99.1 +/- 12.3 kg; body mass index of 36.3 +/- 4.3 kg/ m2) defined their goal weight and 4 other weights: "dream weight"; "happy weight"; "acceptable weight"; and "disappointed weight." Goal weight averaged a 32% reduction in body weight. A 17-kg weight loss was defined as disappointed; a 25-kg loss, was acceptable. After 48 weeks of treatment and a 16-kg weight loss, 47% of patients did not achieve even a disappointed weight. These data illustrate the dramatic disparity between patients' expectations and professional recommendations and the need to help patients accept more modest weight loss outcomes.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Orientation in physical reasoning: determining the edge that would be formed by two surfaces.

Physical reasoning is strongly influenced by various parameters of orientation. The authors report 3 experiments in which this phenomenon was explored for a particularly elementary transformation: the formation of a line from the intersection of 2 planes. Participants perceived pairs of planar surfaces (disks) in a variety of orientations in 3-D space and indicated the orientations of the edges that would result if the surfaces interpenetrated. The ranges of error and response time were large. Performance depended on whether the orientation of the edge that would be formed was the same as components of the orientations of the perceived surfaces, the degree to which the orientation of the edge would be canonical in the environment, and whether the angle between the surfaces would be perpendicular. The results are discussed in the context of a general approach to orientation in perception and physical reasoning.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Teaching Bayesian reasoning in less than two hours.

The authors present and test a new method of teaching Bayesian reasoning, something about which previous teaching studies reported little success. Based on G. Gigerenzer and U. Hoffrage's (1995) ecological framework, the authors wrote a computerized tutorial program to train people to construct frequency representations (representation training) rather than to insert probabilities into Bayes's rule (rule training). Bayesian computations are simpler to perform with natural frequencies than with probabilities, and there are evolutionary reasons for assuming that cognitive algorithms have been developed to deal with natural frequencies. In 2 studies, the authors compared representation training with rule training; the criteria were an immediate learning effect, transfer to new problems, and long-term temporal stability. Rule training was as good in transfer as representation training, but representation training had a higher immediate learning effect and greater temporal stability.

Algorithms↗
PubMed2000

Item analyses of age relations on reasoning tests.

Analyses at the level of individual items were conducted on 11 data sets representing various combinations of participant samples and tests of reasoning. The magnitude of the relations between age and solution accuracy did not vary systematically across a wide range of item difficulty, although there was some evidence for independent age-related influences on the more difficult items. The results were tentatively interpreted as reflecting the operation of at least 2 types of age-related effects on tests of reasoning, 1 common to all items and 1 sensitive to the greater processing demands associated with more difficult items.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2001

Attempted decomposition of age-related influences on two tests of reasoning.

Two studies were designed to determine which of several hypothesized components were primarily responsible for the age-related effects on matrix reasoning (Study 1) and analytical reasoning (Study 2). In neither case were the analyses successful because the variables selected to assess the hypothesized components failed to exhibit discriminant validity and also had little unique age-related influences. These results. along with the results of other analyses, suggest that large proportions of the age-related effects on different cognitive variables are shared and are not independent of one another. Implications of these findings for the interpretation of age-related influences on measures of cognitive functioning are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Memory factors in age-related differences in simple reasoning.

Adults in their 50s were compared with adults in their late teens or 20s in the accuracy of relatively simple reasoning decisions involving varying amounts of information. Because the magnitude of the age differences in decision accuracy was independent of the amount of information relevant to the decision, it was suggested that adults in their 20s and 50s do not differ in the effectiveness of integrating information across multiple premises. However, the 2 groups differed in the accuracy of trials involving only a single relevant premise, and thus it was inferred that 1 factor contributing to reasoning differences within the age range from 20 to 60 may be a failure to encode, or retain, relevant information.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Abstract reasoning in autism: a dissociation between concept formation and concept identification.

The concept identification and concept formation aspects of abstract reasoning were examined in 90 nonmentally retarded individuals with autism and 107 normal controls. It was hypothesized that pronounced deficits would be found on concept formation tests, whereas performance on concept identification tests would be relatively intact. There was a significant difference between individuals with autism and individuals from a matched control group on all abstract reasoning tasks, but, with the exception of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (R. K. Heaton et al., 1993), differences on concept identification tests were not clinically significant. Factor analyses showed that concept formation and concept identification tasks loaded on separate factors in the autism group but not in the control group. Stepwise discriminant function analyses revealed that 2 tests of concept formation correctly classified 78.4% of cases, whereas concept identification tasks did not pass the tolerance test.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Blickets and babies: the development of causal reasoning in toddlers and infants.

Previous research has suggested that preschoolers possess a cognitive system that allows them to construct an abstract, coherent representation of causal relations among events. Such a system lets children reason retrospectively when they observe ambiguous data in a rational manner (e.g., D. M. Sobel, J. B. Tenenbaum, & A. Gopnik, 2004). However, there is little evidence that demonstrates whether younger children possess similar inferential abilities. In Experiment 1, the authors extended previous findings with older children to examine 19- and 24-month-olds' causal inferences. Twenty-four-month-olds' inferences were similar to those of preschoolers, but younger children lacked the ability to make retrospective causal inferences, perhaps because of performance limitations. In Experiment 2, the authors designed an eye-tracking paradigm to test younger participants that eliminated various manual search demands. Eight-month-olds' anticipatory eye movements, in response to retrospective data, revealed inferences similar to those of 24-month-olds in Experiment 1 and preschoolers in previous research. These data are discussed in terms of associative reasoning and causal inference.

Aging↗
PubMed1991

Reasons for the trend toward null findings in research on Type A behavior.

The findings of many studies conducted before 1978 suggest that Type A behavior (TAB) contributes to the development of coronary heart disease (CHD). In contrast, many recent studies have found no association between these variables. Through meta-analysis, several reasons for null findings are identified. First, a type of range restriction bias, disease-based spectrum (DBS) bias, produced many null findings. A study is vulnerable to DBS bias when researchers select only high-risk or diseased Ss for study. Second, self-report measures of TAB were often associated with null findings. Finally, null results were found for all studies that used fatal myocardial infarction as a disease criterion. In addition to identifying the reasons for null findings, this research suggests that TAB, as assessed by the structured interview, is associated with CHD. More Type As (70%) were found in diseased populations of middle-aged men than in healthy populations of middle-aged men (46%).

Coronary Artery Disease↗
PubMed2001

Theories of reasoned action and planned behavior as models of condom use: a meta-analysis.

To examine how well the theories of reasoned action and planned behavior predict condom use, the authors synthesized 96 data sets (N = 22,594) containing associations between the models' key variables. Consistent with the theory of reasoned action's predictions, (a) condom use was related to intentions (weighted mean r. = .45), (b) intentions were based on attitudes (r. = .58) and subjective norms (r. = .39), and (c) attitudes were associated with behavioral beliefs (r. = .56) and norms were associated with normative beliefs (r. = .46). Consistent with the theory of planned behavior's predictions, perceived behavioral control was related to condom use intentions (r. = .45) and condom use (r. = .25), but in contrast to the theory, it did not contribute significantly to condom use. The strength of these associations, however, was influenced by the consideration of past behavior. Implications of these results for HIV prevention efforts are discussed.

Attitude↗
PubMed2000

On belief bias in syllogistic reasoning.

A multinomial model is used to disentangle the respective contributions of reasoning processes and response bias in conclusion-acceptance data that exhibit belief bias. A model-based meta-analysis of 22 studies reveals that such data are structurally too sparse to allow discrimination of different accounts of belief bias. Four experiments are conducted to obtain richer data, allowing deeper tests through the use of the multinomial model. None of the current accounts of belief bias is consistent with the complex pattern of results. A new theory of belief bias is proposed that assumes that most reasoners construct only one mental model representing the premises as well as the conclusion or, in the case of an unbelievable conclusion, its logical negation. New predictions derived from the theory are confirmed in 4 additional studies.

Attitude↗
PubMed2005

Reasoning about relations.

Inferences about spatial, temporal, and other relations are ubiquitous. This article presents a novel model-based theory of such reasoning. The theory depends on 5 principles. (a) The structure of mental models is iconic as far as possible. (b) The logical consequences of relations emerge from models constructed from the meanings of the relations and from knowledge. (c) Individuals tend to construct only a single, typical model. (d) They spontaneously develop their own strategies for relational reasoning. (e) Regardless of strategy, the difficulty of an inference depends on the process of integration of the information from separate premises, the number of entities that have to be integrated to form a model, and the depth of the relation. The article describes computer implementations of the theory and presents experimental results corroborating its main principle.

Algorithms↗
PubMed2004

The generality of working memory capacity: a latent-variable approach to verbal and visuospatial memory span and reasoning.

A latent-variable study examined whether verbal and visuospatial working memory (WM) capacity measures reflect a primarily domain-general construct by testing 236 participants in 3 span tests each of verbal WM. visuospatial WM, verbal short-term memory (STM), and visuospatial STM. as well as in tests of verbal and spatial reasoning and general fluid intelligence (Gf). Confirmatory' factor analyses and structural equation models indicated that the WM tasks largely reflected a domain-general factor, whereas STM tasks, based on the same stimuli as the WM tasks, were much more domain specific. The WM construct was a strong predictor of Gf and a weaker predictor of domain-specific reasoning, and the reverse was true for the STM construct. The findings support a domain-general view of WM capacity, in which executive-attention processes drive the broad predictive utility of WM span measures, and domain-specific storage and rehearsal processes relate more strongly to domain-specific aspects of complex cognition.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Effects of subclinical depression and aging on generative reasoning about linear orders: same or different processing limitations?

The performance of older adults and depressed people on linear order reasoning is hypothesized to be best explained by different theoretical models. Whereas depressed younger adults are found to be impaired in generative inference making, older adults are well capable of making such inferences but exhibit problems with working memory (Experiments 1 and 2). Restriction of the available study time impairs reasoning by nondepressed control participants and. as such, proves to be a good model of older adults' but not depressed participants' limitations (Experiment 3). These results are replicated comparing depressed and older participants with a control group in the same study, providing increased power and linking the results to additional control measures of processing speed and working memory (Experiment 4).

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Do Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) apply causal reasoning to tool-use tasks?

Two experiments addressed contradictory claims about causal reasoning in elephants. In Experiment 1, 4 Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) were pretrained to remove a lid from the top of a bucket and retrieve a food reward. Subsequently, in the first 5 critical trials, when the lid was placed alongside the bucket and no longer obstructed access to the reward, each elephant continued to remove the lid before retrieving the reward. Experiment 2, which involved 11 additional elephants and variations of the original design, yielded similarly counterintuitive observations. Although the results are open to alternative interpretations, they appear more consistent with associative learning than with causal reasoning. Future applications of Fabrean methodologies (J. H. Fabre, 1915) to animal cognition are proposed.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2003

Story understanding and counterfactual reasoning.

D. Kahneman and A. Tversky (1982), in a seminal study on counterfactual reasoning, claimed empirical support for a simulation heuristic wherein ease of converting unusual conditions determines their selection as causes over normal conditions. Discourse analysis of their stories revealed a confounding of explanation and normality. A connectionist simulation of online comprehension and memory access of alternative conditions without conversion accounted for their data. Normality and explanation were varied independently in 2 experiments. Explanation but not normality affected the rank ordering of counterfactual conditions after reading. Access of alternative conditions in simulation was again the best predictor of empirical findings. Comprehension and memory operate where stories communicate information for decision making such as counterfactual reasoning and hindsight bias.

Comprehension↗
PubMed2005

Predicting alcohol patterns in first-year college students through motivational systems and reasons for drinking.

In the present study, a typological approach was used to identify patterns of alcohol use in a sample of 533 college freshmen students (<21 years old; 342 women; 191 men), on the basis of quantity and frequency of consumption, and alcohol-related problems. Personality (sensitivity to reward, SR; sensitivity to punishment, SP) and reasons for drinking were examined as correlates of drinking patterns through a mediational model. Analyses were done separately by gender. Latent profile analyses suggested 5 drinking patterns for both genders, including 3 problematic groups. SR was only associated with the problematic drinking patterns, and enhancement, coping, and social reasons for drinking mediated this relationship. These findings demonstrate the utility of latent profile analysis for identifying a drinking typology and for integrating personality and drinking motives to distinguish drinking patterns.

Adolescent↗