Hayes, B. 1 & Heit, E. 2
1 University of New South Wales, Australia
2 University of California, Merced, USA
This presentation reviews recent findings from a research program examining relations between inductive reasoning and recognition memory. The first experimental series [Heit, E., & Hayes, B. K. (2011). Predicting reasoning from memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140, 76-101] examined how well responses on an inductive reasoning task predicted responses on a recognition memory task. A common stimulus set (e.g., pictures of dogs) was presented for study followed by a test set containing old and new members of the same category. In the recognition condition people were instructed to memorize study instances and respond “yes” at test to old items. In the induction condition people were instructed that study items contained a novel property (“beta-cells”) and to respond “yes” to test items that had this property. Across several experimental manipulations such as varying study time, presentation frequency, and the presence of stimuli from other categories, there was a high correlation between reasoning and memory responses (average r = .87). A second series extended the study of memory-reasoning relations to more complex forms of induction involving meaningful properties. In this case study items were members of a conjunctive category (aquatic mammals) and different inductive properties primed attention to either the aquatic dimension or the mammalian dimension. The relation between reasoning and memory responses was reduced when meaningful properties were used in induction; especially when additional time was given for test decisions. These results point to a common mechanism of exemplar-similarity underlying inductive reasoning and recognition memory, although induction with meaningful properties involves additional rule-based processes. A mathematical model, GEN-EX (GENeralization from EXamples), derived from exemplar models of categorization, is presented, that predicts both reasoning and memory responses from pairwise similarities among the stimuli, allowing for additional influences of deterministic responding.