Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To this day, a great variety of psychological theories of reason-ing exist aimed at explaining the underlying cognitive mecha-nisms. The high number of different theories makes a rigorouscomparison of cognitive theories necessary. The present articleproposes to use Multinomial Processing Trees to compare twoof the most prominent theories of syllogistic reasoning: theMental Models Theory and the Probability Heuristics Model.For this, we reanalyzed data from a meta-analysis on six stud-ies about syllogistic reasoning. We evaluate both models withrespect to their overall fit to the data by means of G2, AIC,BIC, and FIA, and on a parametric level. Our comparison in-dicates that a MMT-variant, though having more parameters, isslightly better on all criteria except of the BIC. Yet, none of thetwo models, realized as MPTs, is clearly superior. We outlinethe impact of the different theoretical principles and discussimplications for modeling syllogistic reasoning.