ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the literature that links mathematical cognition and the psychology of reasoning. It focuses on conditional reasoning, largely because this is where the majority of the research. Conditional reasoning is not the only type of logic required in mathematics. There is some reasonable evidence that studying advanced mathematics does develop reasoning performance, at least to some extent. For instance, understanding existential and universal quantifiers is important for advanced mathematics, and there is some evidence that students struggle. In contrast adopting a biconditional interpretation seems to be relatively rare for mathematicians, perhaps because it may cause problems when constructing proofs. Consistent results were reported by Inglis and Simpson, who found that mathematicians responded differently to the Wason selection task to a control group. Quite why changing the context of the task varies behaviour so dramatically has led to a great deal of debate.
