Sensitivity of reasoning responses to task variation

Determine to what degree small variations in the surface features of a syllogistic task change the response selected by human reasoners.

Background

The paper highlights that superficially minor changes to a syllogistic problem can alter its logically normative conclusion. For example, swapping the terms in the second premise changes one example from a syllogism whose valid conclusion is “All Architects are Chemists” to one with no valid conclusion. The authors identify the unresolved issue as determining how strongly human responses are affected by such small task modifications, noting that existing results suggest many reasoners are insensitive to them.