A Developmental Study On Belief-Bias Effect In Syllogistic Reasoning

Syllogistic reasoning is an important research field of reasoning in psychological study. Much research on syllogisms has demonstrated both form and content of syllogisms can affect human's responses to reasoning tasks. After that, the effect of content factor has gradually become a central focus in psychological studies on human reasoning, and was called content effect. With the rising of cognitive psychology, researches on orientation of the content effect have been replaced by that of the analyzing of belief bias effect.Beliefs are the product of human being's structuring, explaining, controlling, and finding meaning. Because of the features and meanings of beliefs, the study on belief bias effect of syllogistic reasoning is closed to the cognitive psychology. The researches on belief bias effect no longer limit themselves to the connection-law that exists between "content" (i.e. stimulus material) and external reasoning behaviors, but focus on analyzing of people's internal mental process of reasoning, which embodies the study pattern of cognitive psychology. Most researches on belief bias effect in syllogistic reasoning are conducted by foreign researchers who have proposed some theoretical models for explaining belief bias effect, of which the explanation of mental model theory is particularly paid much attention to. However, in China few researches in this field are conducted. Beginning with the exploring of features of syllogistic reasoning in children, the present research analyzes the mechanism of the belief bias in children's syllogistic reasoning and then tests the mental model theory. Meanwhile, this research explores the significance of instruction in children's syllogistic reasoning and the effect of instruction to belief bias effect in reasoning. The results of this research indicate that:(1) all subjects have no mature ability of syllogistic reasoning in this research;(2) mental model theory's prediction that difficult inferences require constructing more models than easy inferences do, is tested by children' reasoning.(3) (1) subjects' inference is greatly affected by the state of logic (valid or invalid).2 belief bias has greater effects on encoding of premise information than that on judging of conclusion information. As premise is concerned, under the condition of believable information, the inference result is better than that under the condition of unbelievable information. As conclusion is concerned, the result is just opposite to that of premise. (3) when beliefs and logical state are consistency, the belief bias increases the correct rate oflogical response, whereas, it decreases the correct rate of logical response when logical state and beliefs are inconsistency.(4) As instruction is concerned, the results are:1different instructions have no significant differences in each grade, but instruction effects are different among different grades. (2) in the dimension of mental model, the instruction has the best effect to one-model inference in present subjects. The instruction that unites regular and instances has better effect thaninstruction that only includes regular.3in the aspect of belief bias effect, firstly, instruction effect mainly demonstrates on logical variable. Secondly, instruction can't conquer the great belief bias effect in the process of premise encoding. Thirdly, regular instruction has better effect on conquering the belief bias effect in the process of conclusion judging.