A new experimental method to identify the process of logical reasoning
MASASI HATTOR, Masanori Nakagawa · Japanese Psychological Research · 1996
Abstract: A new method to identify the process of logical reasoning is presented. In spite of its indispensability and importance, we have had few methods to identify a subject's reasoning process, except that of using verbal protocol data. In this paper, for the purpose of objective identification of the reasoning process, we propose a new method to obtain the subject's reasoning process, in terms of a resolution tree for a task of which the logical structure can be written by first‐order predicate logic. The results of an experiment using this method are presented. They revealed some interesting features of human reasoning such as, large differences between subjects, remarkable parallel processes, and the existence of subgoals for each subject.