Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Dual-processing accounts of reasoning havegained renewed attention in the past decade,particularly in the fields of social judgment,learning, and decision-making under uncertainty.Although the various accounts differ, thecommon thread is the distinction between twoqualitatively different types of reasoning:explicit/implicit, rational/affective, fast/slow, etc.Consequently, much research has focused oncharacterizing the two different processes. Lessextensive are the attempts to find mediators thatinfluence which process is used. In this paper, weargue that the missing perspective on these dual-processing theories is rooted in dynamicalsystems theory. By shifting the perspective to thedynamic interaction and transitions betweendifferent types of reasoning, we provide atheoretical framework for dual-processing withan emphasis on phase transitions. As a specialcase, we focus on dual-processing in decision-making and judgment under uncertainty forwhich we will propose suggestions for futureexperimental evaluation.