Cognitive Reasoning Process Transfer

Transitive inference refers to two or more than two judgments with transitive relation constitute the reasoning premises, through reasoning and determine which is maximum or which is minimum. Transitive inference has been considered as a high-level logical reasoning ability, which is possessed by children who reach to the concrete operational stage. But with the development of research, people found that children as well as the animals can also complete this task. So whether it was a kind of advanced logical reasoning ability has been questioned. And the mainly focus was the role of awareness. There were lots of studies about transitive inference, but due to the different experimental materials, pre-experimental briefing, presentation and so on, the mutual comparability has yet to be confirmed. This study used the different experimental materials (specific images, regular abstract images, irregular abstract images) and number of different logical terms (five logical terms and six logical terms) to study the transitive inference ability. According to the traditional paradigm of transitive inference, the experiment was divided into two stages, training phase and testing phase. In the training stage, subjects were presented two adjacent images randomly, and they were asked to choose one of them. After their choices, the feedback "correct" or "wrong" were presented. There was a hierarchical relationship between these images. After a certain number of exercises, they entered the testing phase. In the testing phase, the novel pairs which were not adjacent as well as end pairs were presented in addition to the studied pairs. The subjects were required to make the right choice according to the rule which was learnt in training phase, and this stage was not to given feedback. After the experiment, subjects were asked to fill out a questionnaire to assess their awareness. One hundred and eight undergraduate and postgraduate students from Nanjing Normal University participated in this experiment. Their average years of education were fifteen, all of them had normal or corrected to normal vision, no color blindness phenomenon. Results showed that, at first, both for the material or series, the accuracy of subjects who were aware of the hierarchical relationship were much higher than the middle awareness and unawareness subjects. It showed the importance of awareness in transitive inference. Secondly, for the different experiment materials, the number of awareness subjects and the accuracy of them were both higher in irregular abstract imagers than the others. The regular abstract images were lower in the number of awareness subjects and the specific images were lower in the accuracy. Finally, for the different tested pairs, the accuracy of awareness and unawareness subjects showed no significant difference respectively. The middle awareness subjects showed an inverted U-shape curve in the group of irregular abstract images, but the others showed no significant difference in each group. The accuracy of end pairs was very high, close to the correct level regardless of materials and the degree of awareness. The experimental results show the obvious endpoint effect and the recency effect. Therefore, the study suggests that awareness plays a very important role in people’s transitive inference, people can’t complete the task without awareness. But at the same time, the study doesn’t oppose the existence of associative learning. People who are between awareness and unawareness may use different strategies according to the situation. In addition, due to the different results of the different materials, the study suggests that the previous comparison among different experimental results lack of sufficient evidence.