A Comparative Study Of The Left And Right Brain Dominant Type And Syllogistic Reasoning Deviation

Studies on syllogistic reasoning in cognitive science as their core task the revelation of the involved mental and brain mechanisms. Over nearly a century's exploration, explanations have been provided from different cognitive theories. To further explore the impact exerted by factors of external stimuli, the individual mental types, cognitive structure and their interactions on syllogistic deduction, we conduct two 3×2×3×2 multi-factor mixed experiments. We are concerned with the following issues especially the interactions between these variables:(1)The emotive information contained in the reasoning tasks;(2)Agreement or disagreement between the emotive information and subject belief;(3)Logic validity;(4)Effects of internal and external variables such as brain sphere dominance(5)Professional training background on reasoning activities.The research has obtained the following results:(1)The emotive information contained in the reasoning tasks exerts a significant effect on the reasoning performances of the subjects and displays an interactional effect with logic validity:when the reasoning tasks contain negative emotive information, subjects have good performance in both logic-valid and logic-invalid reasoning tasks; when the reason tasks contain positive emotive information, subjects have poor performance in conclusion-valid reasoning tasks; when there is no emotive information, subjects have better performance in logic-valid tasks;(2)A difference exists in subjects'judgments of conclusion validity of in syllogistic reasoning when relations between content of the reasoning tasks and subject belief differ:in the case of agreement or disagreement, subjects have better performance in logic-invalid tasks than in logic-valid tasks; in the case of no individual belief involvement, subjects exhibit better performance in logic-valid tasks than in logic-invalid tasks;(3)An interactional effect is observed between subject professional training background and the reasoning task content:when the emotive information in the content is under full control of the reasoning tasks, subjects of liberal arts have a better performance than subjects of science; when the reasoning tasks contain negative or positive emotive information, subjects of liberal arts have a weaker performance;(4)There is a weak correlation between brain sphere dominance test and reasoning performance, which suggests no simple linear correlation between these two factors. Our correlation analysis of brain sphere dominance tests and reasoning task performances shows that subjects with a "scientific experiment" preference tend to score higher marks and receive less logic-invalid interferences; subjects with "clear consciousness" receive less interference from negative emotion; subjects with "clear mental representation and flexible variation" are more apt to interference from belief conflict. There are also interactive effects between variables in brain sphere dominance tests and other research variables, reflecting complex relations between the hemispheric functions and the syllogistic reasoning activities, which also correlate with both variables.The following conclusion can be reached through our experiment:(1)The emotive information contained in reasoning tasks can exert some impact on reasoning performance. In the case of valid logic, negative emotive information leads to better reasoning performance, which is brought about by a "alert effect".(2)There is an obvious belief deviation effect:when task content and individual belief agree with each other, subjects are more apt to receiving logic-valid instead of logic-invalid conclusions; in the case of disagreement, subject are more apt to rejecting valid or invalid conclusion; in the case of no correlation between the two, subjects rely more on rules of logic thinking than on personal experience.(3)There is a difference in emotion control between subjects of liberal arts and subjects of science:when the reasoning tasks contain emotive information, subjects of liberal arts are more apt to interference which puts a negative effect on the depth and order of their thinking and leads to weaker reasoning performance.(4)Marginalization of brain hemisphere function exerts an effect on syllogistic reasoning:subjects of left brain dominance exhibit a more obvious preference for "scientific experiment", have better emotion or consciousness control ability, and are more adapted for analytic and logic-demanding syllogistic reasoning, while subjects of right brain dominance tend to have better reasoning performance due to their relatively stronger space-processing ability.