Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Proportional reasoning is critical for successful functioning across domains and development. However, proportional information is also complex, resulting in behavioral variation across contexts and tasks. In the current study, we systematically compare adults' proportion judgements on a proportion magnitude comparison task and an equivalent proportion matching task with both dot arrays and continuous rectangles. We find that the match-to-sample task is more difficult than the magnitude comparison task and dot arrays are more difficult than the rectangles. Interactions between task and format, as well as specific patterns of errors, provide additional insight into possible explanations for these patterns. Overall, findings provide theoretical insight into the cognitive processes involved in solving proportional tasks and methodological insight into how to best design and interpret performance on both comparison and match-to-sample proportion tasks.