Inhibition et biais de raisonnement chez l'enfant et l'adulte
Institution:
Paris 5Disciplines:
Directors:
Abstract EN:
The overall aim of this thesis is to study the functional architecture of logical reasoning at different stages of cognitive development. It is proposed herein that a "presumption of rationality" is justified, insofar as the bias underlying reasoning errors does not (necessarily) stem from a lack of deductive or inductive competence, but from the faulty executive programming of inhibition. The experiments conducted take an approach based on cognitive competition and use a method where subjects are experimentally trained to inhibit the matching or conjunction bias. They show that executive inhibition in adults plays a key role in classical reasoning tasks, both deductive (rule verification and falsification) and inductive (probability judgments). In school children, this selection-inhibition process is also essential for logical reasoning, as shown firstly by the fact that performance on syllogistic reasoning tasks covaries with inhibition capacity, tested via a battery of executive tasks, and secondly, that matching-bias inhibition training has a significant effect on performance. It follows from these findings that the development of rationality cannot be reduced to the substitution of new, enhanced structures (classical viewpoint held by piaget and the neostructuralists), and that at all ages, the ability to reason is the outcome of the interplay between the activation of available logical schemes and the executive programming of inhibition.
Abstract FR:
L'objectif general de cette these est d'etudier l'architecture fonctionnelle du raisonnement logique, a differents moments du developpement cognitif. Nous soutenons qu'une << presomption de rationalite >> est justifiee dans la mesure ou les biais massifs qui sous-tendent les erreurs de raisonnement ne relevent pas (necessairement) d'un defaut de competence deductive ou inductive, mais d'un defaut de programmation executive de l'inhibition. Mettant l'accent sur la << competition cognitive >>, nos experimentations soulignent le role cle de la programmation executive de l'inhibition, chez l'adulte, dans des taches classiques de raisonnement deductif (epreuves de verification et de refutation de regles) et inductif (epreuves de jugement de probabilite), au moyen de la methode d'apprentissage experimental a l'inhibition du biais d'appariement ou du biais de conjonction. Chez l'enfant d'age scolaire, ce processus de << selection-inhibition >> est egalement essentiel a la conduite d'un raisonnement logique, comme le montrent, d'une part, la covariation entre les performances dans des epreuves de raisonnement syllogistique et les capacites d'inhibition testees par une batterie d'epreuves executives et, d'autre part, l'effet significatif de la methode d'apprentissage a l'inhibition du biais d'appariement. Ceci nous conduit a penser que le developpement du raisonnement ne peut se reduire a la substitution majorante de structures nouvelles (point de vue classique de piaget et du neostructuralisme), mais que la capacite de raisonner exige, a tout age, une articulation etroite entre le repertoire de schemes logiques disponibles et l'efficacite executive de l'inhibition.