Developmental change and individual differences in reasoning

On behalf of the international doctoral school REASON at the Munich Center of the Learning Sciences (MCLS) we are very happy to announce the upcoming visit and guest lecture:

Developmental change and individual differences in reasoning
held by Prof. Henry Markovits
Department of Psychology, Université du Québec à Montréal

SESSION UNFORTUNATELY CANCELLED

Conditional (if-then) reasoning is one of the cornerstones of logical reasoning, and forms a critical basis for both mathematical and scientific thinking. There is however very little consensus about how and when conditional reasoning develops, with some approaches claiming that such reasoning is cognitively primitive while others claim that it is even beyond the capacity of most adults. In the first half of this presentation, I will present a semantic memory theory which is a variant of mental model theory that can explain both early competence and later difficulties. This relies on the basic idea that logical reasoning requires retrieval or generation of implicit forms of information. This allows the specification of a sequence of four forms of information processing corresponding to conditional reasoning with four different kinds of content. Evidence for the sequence will be presented. In the second half, a novel form of individual differences will be examined. The dual strategy model of reasoning is an attempt to reconcile probabilistic and mental model (counterexample-based) forms of reasoning. A simple diagnostic test for strategy use has been developed and will be described. This has been shown to correlate with individual differences in logical reasoning and, importantly, with individual differences in very different forms of reasoning such as stereotype bias, mental rotation, and emotional processing. Evidence that this distinction predicts individual differences in reasoning over and above working memory, and the CRT, will be presented. Implications of both of these effects for learning and use of broader mathematical and scientific concepts will be discussed.

Short Bio
Henry Markovits is a Professor of psychology at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He studies the development and use of logical and of social reasoning and has published over a 100 journal articles and chapters on these subjects. He is currently Associate Editor of Thinking and Reasoning.