Lea, O'Brien, Fish, Noveck e Braine (1990) investigated a variety of inferences in text of comprehension with undergraduate psychology students and the results showed that subjects carried out the proposional logical inferences spontaneous by automatically manner. These investigation explores whether mathematic students demonstrate logic reasoning better than letters students. Students from the two courses were studied with the aim of knowning whether the students could solve the logical reasoning tasks. The subjects performed two tasks: a task of Conclusion and a task of Recognition. On the first task, the subjects answered sylogistic problems and on the second they had to distinguish sentences with the aim to observe if they could recognized if the informations were in the text or were inferences made. The first task confirmed that the subjects authomaticaly used the inferences. On the second task, the subjects believed that the paraphases of the model had been explicitly presented in the text, and rarely believed that the sentences were results of inferences that they had made. The performance of literature students were better than mathematic students.
Logical inferences; Paraphrases; Syllogisms
