section_path: Reason in particular fields of study/Psychology and cognitive science/Behavioral experiments on human reasoning
section_name: Behavioral experiments on human reasoning
paragraph_text: Behavioral experiments on human reasoning
  
  Experimental cognitive psychologists carry out research on reasoning behaviour. Such research may focus, for example, on how people perform on tests of reasoning such as intelligence or IQ tests, or on how well people's reasoning matches ideals set by logic (see, for example, the Wason test). Experiments examine how people make inferences from conditionals like if A then B and how they make inferences about alternatives like A or else B. They test whether people can make valid deductions about spatial and temporal relations like A is to the left of B or A happens after B, and about quantified assertions like all the A are B. Experiments investigate how people make inferences about factual situations, hypothetical possibilities, probabilities, and counterfactual situations.