Psychological differentiation and performance on conditional reasoning tasks.

The relationship between psychological differentiation and performance on three content types (concrete-plausible, concrete-implausible, symbolic) of conditional reasoning tasks was investigated. Using intelligence as a covariate, field-independent subjects (n = 94) in Grade 8 performed significantly better than field-dependent subjects (n = 121) on each type of content. A significant interaction was found. Greater differences between field independent and field-dependent subjects were observed for concrete-implausible and symbolic contents than for concrete-plausible content.