BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    The probabilistic approach to human reasoning

    Oaksford, Mike and Chater, N. (2001) The probabilistic approach to human reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5 (8), pp. 349-357. ISSN 1364-6613.

    Full text not available from this repository.

    Abstract

    A recent development in the cognitive science of reasoning has been the emergence of a probabilistic approach to the behaviour observed on ostensibly logical tasks. According to this approach the errors and biases documented on these tasks occur because people import their everyday uncertain reasoning strategies into the laboratory. Consequently participants’ apparently irrational behaviour is the result of comparing it with an inappropriate logical standard. In this article, we contrast the probabilistic approach with other approaches to explaining rationality, and then show how it has been applied to three main areas of logical reasoning: conditional inference, Wason's selection task and syllogistic reasoning.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): brain imaging, optical imaging, Event-Related Optical Signal, near-infrared spectroscopy, serial processing, parallel processing
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 20 Sep 2016 10:05
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:26
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/16104

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    0Downloads
    6 month trend
    216Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item
    Edit/View Item