Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/M46600/01
Title:	INTERPRETATION AND REASONING PROCESSES IN THE UNDERSTANDING OF CONDITIONAL RULES
Principal Investigator:	Stenning, Professor K
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Human Communication Research Centre
Organisation:	University of Edinburgh
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 January 1999	Ends:	30 June 1999	Value (£):	4,500
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Cognitive Science Appl. in ICT
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
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Summary on Grant Application Form
A theory of how people understand and reason from information expressed as conditional rules is a central theoretical problem in human language processing. Forty years of empirical studies using Watson's (1977( 4 card and other tasks has mapped human success and failure in some detail, and spawned several conflicting approaches to modelling the phenomena. Gebauer and Laming (1977) make the radical claim that student subjects reason perfectly but from specified non-standard interpretations of the presented conditionals. Their work opens up a much needed distinction between interpretation and reasoning processes. It also provides empirical problems for recent Bayesian accounts ( e.g. Oaksford and Chater 1996) which assume uniformity of interpretation across subjects. But Gebauer and Laming's results cannot discriminate whether interpretation determines reasoning, or whether it is difficulties of reasoning which affect students' interpretations.Preparatory experimental work has made explicit the several interpretations proposed by Gebauer and Laming. The results show that student fail (quite radically) to discriminate between these alternatives. This striking result rules out a simple interpretational theory and demands an explanation in terms of the interaction of interpretation and reasoning process. Students appear to operate with a highly underspecified interpretation of the conditional as merely indicating the presence of some unspecified contingency. It is modelling this underspecification, along with the collection of further data to test our proposals that constitutes the aim of this proposal.
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