The Warrington Recognition Memory for Faces (RMF) and the Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT) are commercially available tests that are commonly used by clinicians and cognitive neuropsychologists to evaluate unfamiliar face recognition. Yet, it is not clear that a normal score on either instrument demonstrates normal unfamiliar face recognition. Because the RMFs stimuli contain abundant non-internal facial feature information, subjects may be able to score in the normal range without using internal facial features. On the BFRT, subjects commonly rely on feature matching strategies using the hairline and eyebrows rather than recognizing the facial configuration. To test whether these routes to recognition can support normal performance, normal subjects were tested with versions of the RMF and the BFRT in which the faces had been painted over in a way that prevented the operation of some of the procedures normally involved with face recognition. Even though these modifications removed all of the internal feature information in the RMF, many subjects scored in the normal range, and despite precluding the use of configural processing in the BFRT, many of the scores were in the normal range. As a result, it is apparent that normal scores on these tests do not demonstrate normal unfamiliar face recognition and so clinicians should be cautious in interpreting scores in the normal range. Finally, these results place in question models supported by dissociations involving normal performance on these tests.

This work investigates the nature of two distinct response patterns in a probabilistic truth table evaluation task, in which people estimate the probability of a conditional on the basis of frequencies of the truth table cases. The conditional-probability pattern reflects an interpretation of conditionals as expressing a conditional probability. The conjunctive pattern suggests that some people treat conditionals as conjunctions, in line with a prediction of the mental-model theory. Experiments 1 and 2 rule out two alternative explanations of the conjunctive pattern. It does not arise from people believing that at least one case matching the conjunction of antecedent and consequent must exist for a conditional to be true, and it does not arise from people adding the converse to the given conditional. Experiment 3 establishes that people's response patterns in the probabilistic truth table task are very consistent across different conditionals, and that the two response patterns generalize to conditionals with negated antecedents and consequents. Individual differences in rating the probability of a conditional were loosely correlated with corresponding response patterns in a classical truth table evaluation task, but there was little association with people's evaluation of deductive inferences from conditionals as premises. A theoretical framework is proposed that integrates elements from the conditional-probability view with the theory of mental models.

We present an integrated model for the understanding of and the reasoning from conditional statements. Central assumptions from several approaches are integrated into a causal path model. According to the model, the cognitive availability of exceptions to a conditional reduces the subjective conditional probability of the consequent, given the antecedent. This conditional probability determines people's degree of belief in the conditional, which in turn affects their willingness to accept logically valid inferences. In addition to this indirect pathway, the model contains a direct pathway: Availability of exceptional situations directly reduces the endorsement of valid inferences. We tested the integrated model with three experiments using conditional statements embedded in pseudonaturalistic cover stories. An explicitly mentioned causal link between antecedent and consequent was either present (causal conditionals) or absent (arbitrary conditionals). The model was supported for the causal but not for the arbitrary conditional statements.

Previous research (Oberauer & Wilhelm, 2000) has shown an inherent directionality between the two terms linked in premises of typical deductive reasoning tasks. With three experiments we investigated the effect of inherent directionality on the time to integrate two premises and for the derivation of a conclusion. We varied figure (i.e., order of terms in the premises) and direction of inference (i.e., order of terms in the conclusion) in deduction tasks from various domains (propositional reasoning, syllogisms, spatial, temporal, and linear order reasoning). Effects of figure on premise reading times varied with the directionality of the relations. Effects of direction of inference reflected the same directionality for a subset of relations. We propose that two factors are jointly responsible for a large part of observed directionality effects in premise integration: the inherent directionality of relational statements and a general advantage for a given-new order of terms in the second premise. Difficulty of deriving a conclusion is affected by the directionality or relations if and only if the relation is semantically asymmetric, so that the directionality must be preserved in the integrated mental model.

In the standard three-term spatial reasoning task, the reasoner receives a pair of spatial-relational premises, P1 and P2, in verbal form-for example, The knife is to the left of the vase. The vase is to the left of the glass. Then he/she is asked for the spatial relation not explicitly asserted; in the example above, that is the relation between the knife and the glass. 1 How do people accomplish this task? Huttenlocher (1968) suggested that people construct a spatial image of the described layout and then read off the unmentioned relation from that image. Accordingly, the main task is to construct an integrated representation of the spatial layout, a process that we refer to as premise integration: "In explaining the mental processes of the problem solver, one may deal only with the issue of how information from the two premises is combined. . . . This process is traditionally what is meant by reasoning, as separable from merely understanding the individual premises" (Huttenlocher & Higgins, 1971, p. 487). To characterize the reasoning task in this wayas language understanding beyond the level of single sentences-is to conceive of it as text comprehension. We would then expect premise integration to be guided by principles of language comprehension.Huttenlocher 's (1968) idea that the reasoner operates on a representation of the described layout rather than on a representation of the description of the layout has been further developed by Johnson-Laird (1983 in his mental model theory. Within this framework, an initial mental model is constructed on the basis of the first premise, and then the new element mentioned in the second premise is integrated into the initial model. Thus, premise integration should be especially sensitive to properties of the second premise. The present work is an attempt to bring ideas from reasoning and from language comprehension research within the mental model framework. In particular, we tested two linguistically motivated principles of premise integration, the given-new principle derived from work on discourse pragmatics, and the relatum ϭ given principle developed in the tradition of model theories of reasoning. The Given-New StrategyOn the basis of linguistic analyses (e.g., Chafe, 1970 2 ; Halliday, 1968), Clark and Haviland (1977) postulated the given-new strategy for language comprehension. Integrating information of the current sentence with previous information is performed in three steps: (1) identifying the given information of the current sentence, (2) finding an antecedent for the given information, and (3) attaching the new information to the antecedent. Since the first two steps are carried out as soon as the given information is encoded, mentioning given information before new information speeds up integration. On the other hand, mentioning new information initially in a sentence increases memory load because it requires holding the new information in abeyance until the given information becomes available. On the basis of these assumptions, the given-new strategy...