HOW DO LOGICAL INFERENCE RULES HELP CONSTRUCT SOCIAL MENTAL MODELS

Starting from recent approaches in mental model research, it is argued that (1) logical inference rules are used in order to construct menta l cliques from learned sentiment relations, and (2) social context cue s (operationalized as primes) play a crucial role in activating such r ules. Transitivity and antitransitivity are taken as examples. and are shown as core constituents of such models. In a first experiment, pri ming was achieved by announcing the sorting of fictitious persons in e ither two or three cliques. Thirty-one subjects studied eight sets of sentiment relations among these persons that either did or did not sat isfy their primed clique expectations. They showed longer study times and more requests for additional information in the case of inconsiste nt fits between prime and set. Their sorting solutions also showed cle ar priming effects. A second experiment (n = 30) showed that when unde rgoing a recognition test after seeing the relation sets, subjects ten ded to confuse model-consistent distracters with information they had actually seen. In a third experiment (n = 30) the results from Experim ent 1 were replicated using more realistic learning materials. (C) 199 7 Academic Press.