Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Hyperproof is a computer program created by Barwise and Etchemendy for teaching logic using multimodal graphical and sentential methods, inspired by their theories of heterogeneous reasoning (Barwise and Etchemendy 1994). Elsewhere, we have proposed a theory of the cognitive impact of assigning information to different modalities (Stenning and Oberlander 1992). Our view is that where diagrams are advantageous, it is because they enforce the representation of information, leading to weak expressiveness, thereby facilitating inference. The present study tests and develops these claims by comparing the effects of teaching undergraduate logic classes using Hyperproof and a conUx)l syntactic teaching method. Results indicate that there is significant transfer from the logic courses to logical and analytical reasoning problems. There are also significant interactions between theoretically motivated pre-course aptitude measures and teaching mediod; the interactions influence postcourse reasoning performance in transferdomains. Hyperproof boosts students previously weak on items which benefit from diagram use, whereas the syntactic course appears to degrade the same group of students' graphical strategies. As well as being theoretically interesting, these results provide support for the important practical conclusion that individual differences in aptitude should be taken into account in choosing teaching technique.