K. Oberauer et O. Wilhelm, Effects of directionality in deductive reasoning: I. The comprehension of single relational premises, J EXP PSY L, 26(6), 2000, pp. 1702-1712
Citations number
32
Categorie Soggetti
Psycology
Journal title
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-LEARNING MEMORY AND COGNITION
Four experiments involving 123 university students tested directionality ef
fects in the comprehension of spatial relations, quantified statements, and
propositional connectives with a sentence-picture verification task. Prese
ntation of the referents of terms in the statements was separated by 1 s, a
nd presentation order was congruent or incongruent with the order of terms
in the statement. Some relations showed faster verification times for congr
uent display order, others for incongruent display order, and still others
showed no directionality effect. The authors proposed a 2-step process mode
l for the construction of semantic representations of relational statements
, in which a reference object is established first, and then the second obj
ect is attached in relation to it. This theory explains the various directi
onality effects as a general preference to process information about the re
ference object before information about the target object.