Exploring individual differences in deductive reasoning as a function of 'autistic'-like traits

摘要

From a logical viewpoint, people must reason to as well as from interpretations in deductiveudreasoning tasks. There are two main interpretative stances (e.g., Stenning & vanudLambalgen, 2004, 2005, 2008): credulous, the act of trying to infer the speaker's intendedudmodel; and sceptical, an adversarial strategy. A range of contextual factors inuduence interpretation,udbut there are also differences between individuals across situations. Takingudan individual differences approach, this thesis focuses on reasoning in relation to milderudvariants of the autism spectrum condition (ASC) phenotype in a typically developing (TD)udpopulation. Earlier work on discourse processing in ASC using the `suppression' task (vanudLambalgen & Smid, 2004; Pijnacker et al., In press) shows that some aspects of reasoningudto interpretations are different in the ASC population. Given that autistic traits involveudimpairment, e.g., in pragmatic language, and peaks of ability, e.g., in perceptual tasks, itudwas hypothesised that autistic traits would predict features of the inferences people in theudTD population draw.udData were collected from university students on a range of reasoning tasks making itudpossible to investigate the extent to which interpretation is consistent across task withinudindividuals. Tasks chosen were: conditional reasoning using the `suppression' task andudWason's selection task; one and two-premise Aristotelian quantifer reasoning; the Lindaudproblem; and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices. Autistic traits were assessed usingudthe Autism Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), used previously to studyudautistic traits in TD individuals, and the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (Hurleyudet al., 2007).udAutistic traits predicted patterns of inference in many of the tasks. The earlier suppressionudtask result in ASC was replicated and extended in our TD population. Differentuddimensions of autistic trait related differentially to features of the inferences drawn. Someudof the inferences drawn were recognisably related to the credulous versus sceptical distinctionudand correlated cross-task whilst others were seemingly related to more general topdownudversus bottom-up processing preferences. These results provide further evidence ofudthe existence of qualitative individual differences in deductive reasoning. They also showudthe importance of seeking cross-task correlates to move beyond studies of individual tasksudand study reasoning to and from interpretations in the same individual.