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How Diagrams Can Improve Reasoning
Abstract
We report an experimental study on the effects of diagrams on deductive reasoning with double disjunctions, for example: Raphael is in Tacoma or Julia is in Atlanta, or both. Julia is in Atlanta or Paul is in Philadelphia, or both. What follows? We confirmed that subjects find it difficult to deduce a valid conclusion, such as Julia is in Atlanta, or both Raphael is in Tacoma and Paul is in Philadelphia. In a preliminary study, the format of the premises was either verbal or diagrammatic, and the diagrams used icons to distinguish between inclusive and exclusive disjunctions. The diagrams had no effect on performance. In the main experiment, the diagrams made the alternative possibilities more explicit. The subjects responded faster (about 35 s) and drew many more valid conclusions (nearly 30%) from the diagrams than from the verbal premises. These results corroborate the theory of mental models and have implications for the role of diagrams in reasoning.
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Cited by
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Kita, S., Alibali, M. W., & Chu, M. (2017) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/rev0000059 · Cited by 342
Variational Mixture-of-Experts Autoencoders for Multi-Modal Deep Generative Models
Shi, Y., Siddharth, N., Paige, B., & Torr, P. H. S. (2019) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1911.03393 · Cited by 186
Verbal and visual causal arguments
Oestermeier, U., & Hesse, F. W. (2000) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(00)00060-3 · Cited by 88
Metadata
- Authors
- Bauer, M. I., & Johnson-Laird, P. N.
- Venue
- Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1993-11
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 372-378
- ISSN
- 0956-7976 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-9280
- OpenAlex
- W1970844071
- Cited by
- 334
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 24.69
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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