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The purpose of this research was to study the relationship between subjects’ responses to a series of syllogistic logic problems with at least one “All...” premise, and their responses to a series of probe questions. The latter were used to classify the subjects as either Identity (i.e., “All of the X are Y” necessarily equals “All of the Y are X”), and Logical (i.e., “All of the X are Y” does not necessarily equal “All of the Y are X”) reasoners. In Experiment 1, 95 undergraduate subjects were presented with 28 syllogisms with at least one “All...” premise, followed by an Immediate Inference probe. A significant, but small correlation (R2=.05) was found between the syllogism and probe responses in Experiment 1. Experiment 2, followed the same procedure, classified the Physics graduate subjects as Logical and found a correlation between their syllogism responses and their probe responses. Experiment 3, added an Euler circle drawing task, and Euler circle identification task to the probes, and used undergraduates, Physics, and History graduate subjects. When the probes were presented before the syllogisms, the undergraduates’ syllogism responses improved, and there was a significant correlation between their probe and syllogism responses. However, when the syllogisms were presented before the probes, the results from the undergraduates replicated the findings of Experiment 1. Therefore, because the probe/syllogism correlation was dependent on the probe/syllogism presentation order, it was concluded that the undergraduate subjects did not use logic to solve the syllogisms, thus supporting Woodworth & Sells (1935) Atmosphere Effect theory. The results from the Physics and History graduate students showed there was a correlation between their probe and syllogism responses regardless of probe/syllogism order. In addition, it was concluded that a diverse subject population was required to show that the syllogism responses from the Identity and Logical subjects were significantly different.
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