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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.

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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

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