The psychology of reasoning is the study of how people reason, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions.^[1] It is at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, and probability theory.

Research in this area addresses questions such as:

• How do people reason about sentences in natural language? The most famous example is Peter Wason's selection task, which tests how people reason about the conditional "if P then Q". Other popular tasks include categorical syllogisms and various logic puzzles like Sudoku.
• Psychologically, what are the relationships between induction, deduction, abduction, and analogy?
• What are the appropriate competence models? What does it mean to be rational? Initially classical logic was chosen as a model.^[2] Later researchers have opted for non-monotonic logic^[3][4] and Bayesian probability^[5]. There is also the mental model approach towards reasoning.
• How does reasoning relate to intelligence?^[6]

• How do various related factors such as linguistic pragmatics and emotion relate to the inferences people draw?^[7][8]

• What are the neural correlates of reasoning, often investigated using event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging?^[9]

External links

• London Reasoning Workshop
• Logic in the Humanities, Social and Computational sciences (LogICCC)

Notes