Using the Chinese Ring Puzzle, we studied the effect on rule discovery of having to plan actions or not in order to reach a goal state. This was done by asking participants to predict legal moves as in implicit learning tasks and by asking participants to make legal moves as in problem-solving tasks. Our hypothesis was that having a specific goal state to reach has a dual effect on rule discovery. The first effect is positive and related to feedback from (...) moves done in order to attain the goal: generalising the results of action and associating them to the conditions in which they were obtained allows discovery of the rule and learning it. The second effect is negative. In attempting to reach a specific goal, participants first tend to reduce the distance that separates the current state from the goal state and so neglect the kind of exploration that facilitates rule and procedure discovery because this would seem to be a detour from the goal. Results show that having to plan actions improved performance in implicit learning tasks, yet it impaired performance in problem-solving tasks. Although implicit learning and problem solving are based on rule discovery, and entail noticing regularities in the material, in both cases, rule discovery processes appear to be task-dependent. (shrink)

The utterance of a negative statement invites the pragmatic inference that some reason exists for the proposition it negates to be true; this pragmatic inference paves the way for the logically unexpected Modus Shmollens inference: “If p then q ; not- q ; therefore, p.” Experiment 1 shows that a majority of reasoners endorse Modus Shmollens from an explicit major conditional premise and a negative utterance as a minor premise: e.g., reasoners conclude that “the soup tastes like garlic” from the (...) premises “If a soup tastes like garlic, then there is garlic in the soup; Carole tells Didier that there is no garlic in the soup they are eating.” Experiment 2 shows that this effect is mediated by the derivation of a pragmatic inference from negation. We discuss how theories of conditional reasoning can integrate such a pragmatic effect. (shrink)

Using a latent variable modelling strategy we study individual differences in patterns of answers to the selection task and to the truth table task. Specifically we investigate the prediction of mental model theory according to which the individual tendency to select the false consequent card (in the selection task) is negatively correlated with the tendency to judge the false antecedent cases as irrelevant (in the truth table task). We fit a psychometric model to two large samples ( N = 486, (...) twice), and find no evidence for this negative correlation. We examine which of the assumptions of the model theory must be amended to accommodate our findings. (shrink)