Experimental Study On The Illusion Of Conditional Reasoning For College Students

Cognitive psychology is such a science in which researchers study the law of human mental activities from the eyes of information processing. In 1980's it was introduced into China, but it was developed differently in different aspects. Chinese researchers have done much in the law of perception, model recognization, representation and memory, and achieved a lot. However, in other aspects, such as, deductive reasoning, there's a long way for us to go. In this paper, we have done some research on the illusion of conditional reasoning for college students. We assume that it is the understanding and representation of proposition, positive representation bias and the limited capacity of short-term memory that influenced the reasoning. The last two items were discussed in other former researches, but the first item is new.In our study, we designed two experiments. In the first one, we let the subjects write down their understanding of conjunction proposition, disjunction proposition, abstract conditional proposition and concrete conditional proposition. Then we analyze their representation. In the second one, we trained the subjects on the understanding of all the propositions used in experiment one at first, and then chose the ones who can understand all the propositions to do the reasoning task in which illusion questions and controlling questions are included. At last we analyzed the effect of the understanding of propositions and positive representation bias on the reasoning task. From the two experiments, we obtained the results...