ABSTRACT
The main theories of deductive reasoning agree on the crucial role of working memory (WM) in the explanation of people’s performance (see, for instance, Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991; Rips, 1994). However, researchers have paid little attention so far to the role of working memory in reasoning. In this chapter we analyse some theoretical and methodological issues related to the study of working memory and reasoning. Likewise, we examine the role of WM in reasoning from the mental model approach and review previous studies in this field. Finally, we present the main results of two studies in which we used two new tests of working memory for reasoning. In the first study we compare people’s performance in Daneman and Carpenter’s (1980) classic reading span test (RST) with their performance in two new “reasoning span” tests based on the solving of pronominal anaphora and analogy problems. In the second study we explore the relationship, in disjunctive and conditional inference tasks, between propositional reasoning performance and WM measured by means of the RST and the two new tests.
