Hypothetical-thinking based on cognitive decoupling and thinking dispositions in a dual cognitive agent

Abstract

Abstract We present an implementation of the hypothetical-thinking capacities of our cognitive architecture, based on Stanovich’s tripartite framework ( Stanovich, 2009 ). To illustrate and study processing by this new feature, we simulated a well-known task in the psychology of reasoning (the Wason card selection task) with four different cognitive styles (strongly reactive, purely executive, weakly reflective, purely reflective) and were able to reproduce the results and types of errors found in studies of human reasoning abilities. The first three profiles account for the results of 90% of human subjects (all those who provide answers that are not acceptable by logical standards). The strongly reactive profile gave a plausible account of the way humans provide the logically incorrect answer to the task. The purely executive and weakly reflective gave an account of how subjects can provide part of the correct answer. The last profile (purely reflective), a much a much slower process, produces a complete and correct answer by logical standards. While the purely reflective process was the only one able to do this, it is to be noted that the purely executive system was able to provide a correct (but incomplete) answer using less computational resources (time).