Resumo

GUERREIRO, João; QUELHAS, Ana Cristina  e  GARCIA-MADRUGA, Juan A.. Memória de trabalho e inferência silogística: Estudo exploratório de novas medidas. Aná. Psicológica [online]. 2006, vol.24, n.2, pp.131-146. ISSN 0870-8231.

The present study envisages the relationship between working memory and syllogistic reasoning from an individual differences perspective (i.e. whether or not the performance on the reasoning task can be predicted from the working memory capacity). A group of syllogistic inference problems were used. These problems differed in terms of cognitive demands (i.e. one vs. two mental models) according to the mental model theory (e.g. Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991). The working memory capacity was measured not only by the classic reading span test but also, as several critics have been recently addressed to functionality of this measure in these kinds of studies, two new measures based on analogical and anaphorical problems were used (cf. Gar-cía-Madruga et al., 2003). In these two sorts of tasks (i.e. working memory and syllogistic reasoning tasks) participated 60 students. The main suppositions of the mental model theory were confirmed in terms of accuracy, i.e., multiple mental models problems showed more difficulties to participants than single-model ones and participants with higher resources in terms of working memory capacity showed also better performance on the syllogistic reasoning task.

Palavras-chave : Working memory; syllogistic inference; Mental Model Theory.

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