SPATIAL DEDUCTIVE REASONSING
- Authors
- Corporate Authors
- Defence and Civil Inst of Environmental Medicine, Downsview ONT (CAN)
- Abstract
- Three-dimensional spatial deductive reasoning is essential for Air-to-Air combat maneuvers. Yet, no study has determined the processes that underlie this type of deductive reasoning. This study addresses this issue by ptting two opponent theories of deductive reasoning: the Formal Rules theory and the Mental Model theory. Method. Twenty-six subjects resolved 144 spatial deductive problems. These problems described one-dimensional layouts (1D), two-dimensional layouts (2D), and three-dimensional layouts (3D). Each of these dimensional conditions included three problem types which varied by the number of mental models and/or the length of the formal derivation required for their solution. Each problem type included eigh tsets of premises, each set being presented once for each question type (question EB and question ED). Formal derivations were identical for all dimensional conditions (question EB), and identical for dimensional conditions 2D and 3D (question ED). Results. The difficulty of the problems increased significantly with the number of spatial dimensions despite the identifical length of their formal derivations. For dimensional conditions 2D and 3D, problems based on two models were significantly more difficult to resolve than problems based on one model despite the fact that the former required shorter formal derivations than the latter. TRUNCATED
- Keywords
- Deductive reasoning;Spatial reasoning;Deduction
- Report Number
- DCIEM-95-P-40 — Paper from the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the IMTA
- Date of publication
- 01 Oct 1995
- Number of Pages
- 8
- DSTKIM No
- 98-00037
- CANDIS No
- 506691
- Format(s):
- Hardcopy;Document Image stored on Optical Disk
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