The Syllogistic Reasoning Task: Reasoning Principles and Heuristic Strategies in Modeling Human Clusters

Abstract

It seems widely accepted that human reasoning cannot be modeled by means of classical logic. Psychological experiments have repeatedly shown that participants’ answers systematically deviate from the classical logically correct answers. Recently, a new computational logic approach to modeling human syllogistic reasoning has been developed which seems to perform better than other state-of-the-art cognitive theories. We take this approach as starting point, yet instead of trying to model the human reasoner, we aim at identifying clusters of reasoners, which can be characterized by reasoning principles or by heuristic strategies.