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Awareness of the ‘possible’ as a mediator of formal thinking in conditional reasoning problems
Author(s) -
Markovits Henry
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1984.tb01907.x
Subject(s) - psychology , test (biology) , cognitive psychology , verbal reasoning , context (archaeology) , relation (database) , developmental psychology , social psychology , cognition , computer science , database , paleontology , neuroscience , biology
This study attempted to test the hypothesis that formal reasoning on conditional logic problems of the form p r̊ q is mediated by awareness of the existence and pertinence of possible relations of the form a r̊ q. A paper‐and‐pencil test consisting of three conditional reasoning problems and a fourth question designed to measure subjects' awareness of alternate possibilities within the context of a given conditional relation was administered to 239 post‐secondary students. Of these subjects, 143 were also given an individual conditional reasoning test using an apparatus with visible and invisible trajectories. The results indicated that, while individual performance on the two tests varied greatly, it remained correlated with subjects' awareness of the ‘possible’. In addition, analysis of non‐formal responses produced in both tests indicated that certain of these could be reasonably categorized as intermediate or transitional responses between concrete and formal levels.