A NEW EXPERIMENTAL-METHOD TO IDENTIFY THE PROCESS OF LOGICAL REASONING

A new method to identify the process of logical reasoning is presented . In spite oi its indispensability and importance, we have had few met hods to identify a subject's reasoning process, except that of using v erbal protocol data. In this paper, for the purpose of objective ident ification oi the reasoning process, we propose a new method to obtain the subject's reasoning process, in terms of a resolution tree for a t ask oi which the logical structure can be written by first-order predi cate logic. The results of an experiment using this method are present ed. They revealed some interesting features of human reasoning such as , large differences between subjects, remarkable parallel processes, a nd the existence of subgoals for each subject.