More than just logic tasks: New Approaches to understanding Reasoning

New Directions Reasoning research has long been associated with paper and pencil tasks in which peoples’ reasoning skills are judged against established normative conventions (e.g., Logic). In this way researchers have tried to assess the extent to which we can think rationally, and of course how we deviate from normative conventions. The “fruit flies” of this domain have been the Wason selection task (Wason, 1966), and Syllogistic reasoning tasks (Johnson-Laird, 1984). The field has advanced in helping us to understanding the influence of context on the kinds of inferences we tend to make, and we have gained significant insights into the kinds of situations in which our biased thinking is aligned with normative thinking and the situations in which it conflicts with it. While such gains have led to proposals that the underlying mechanisms that support reasoning are highly adaptive, outside of reasoning research, the most commonly known findings are from classic paper and pencil tasks. The field has significantly moved on and the range of empirical methods developed to examine reasoning behavior has broadened along with the empirical tools for measuring patterns in our inductive and deductive thinking. This symposium brings to the fore new pioneering research and findings with the aim of stimulating discussion on innovative methods that are currently used to shed new light on old issues (How biased are we? Is there a relationship between our intuitive and analytical thinking?). Moreover, the overview of these new approaches in the reasoning field will allow us to highlight the links with ongoing research in other fields (e.g., memory, cognitive control, general neuroscience) to the cognitive science community. This should help to boost much needed interdisciplinary research efforts. Moreover, the aim is to generate new insights into theoretical issues concerning the relationship between heuristic-based inferences and deliberative-based inferences, and the possible meta-cognitive processes thought to arbitrate between the two. The talks range from using priming techniques, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electrodermal recordings (SCR), event-related potentials (ERP), repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), and memory probing through to incorporating clinical populations. Wim De Neys has been using fMRI, EEG, and SCR to examine bias detection during thinking, Taeko Tsujii’s work using rTMS is the first of its kind to use this method to examine brain regions associated with belief-biased reasoning. Magda Osman has pioneered the use of supraliminal and subliminal priming methods in reasoning research to uncover the rational status of people’s underlying reasoning behavior. Simon Handley’s developmental work has established a new line of research that has revealed the absence of belief biased reasoning in a clinical population, which in turn has helped to establish critical processes in non-clinical populations that show the bias.