
 
Hence, the present research was designed to 
study healthy subjects engaged into two reasoning 
tasks, valid syllogisms versus paradoxes, adjusted to 
induce working memory (WM). 
Contemporary neuropsychological views define 
WM as the capacity of the human subject to keep 
information ‘on-line’ necessary for an ongoing task 
(Baddeley, 1998); (Collette and Van der Linden, 
2002). Accordingly, WM is not for ‘memorizing’ 
per se; it is rather in the service of complex 
cognitive activities, such as reasoning, monitoring, 
problem solving, decision making, planning and 
searching/shifting the initiation or inhibition 
response (Miyake and Shah, 1999); (Glassman, 
2000). Thus, WM incorporates, among others, a 
central executive system. Therefore, the present 
study, dealing with a sample of healthy adults, aims 
at determining if different patterns of electro-
physiological activity exist, as reflected by event 
related potentials (ERPs). Each experimental 
condition and setting is adjusted, so as to induce 
working memory operation. 
Event-related potential (ERP) techniques are 
known to be useful tools in the investigation of 
information processing and seem to be sensitive to 
subtle neuropsychological changes (Kotchoubey, 
2006); (Kotchoubey et al., 2002); (Papageorgiou and 
Rabavilas, 2003); (Papageorgiou et al. 2004); 
(Beratis et al. 2009). The main goal of the present 
work is to provide direct evidence of association 
and/or dissociation of Aristotelian syllogistic 
reasoning and reasoning induced during the 
exposition to paradoxes. A comparative study of 
these activation patterns in Aristotelian and paradox-
related reasoning could reveal critical aspects of 
reasoning processing, associated with perception, 
attention and cognitive behaviour. We note that 
these aspects are unobservable with behavioural 
methods alone. 
2 METHODS 
2.1 Participants 
This study was approved by the Ethics committee of 
University Mental Health Research Institute 
(UMHRI). Thirty-one healthy subjects (aged 33.6 
years on average, standard deviation: 9.1; 17 males) 
participated in the experiment. All participants gave 
written consent, after being extensively informed 
about the procedure. They all had normal vision and 
no one had neurological or psychiatric history. 
2.2  Behavioural Procedures and the 
Four Different Classes of Questions 
The participants were seated comfortably 1m away 
from a computer monitor in an electromagnetically 
shielded room. First, proper instructions were given 
to the participants together with a training test. The 
participants entered the formal experimental session, 
once they had fully comprehended the experimental 
task. The experiment was designed to validate two 
mental functions, one associated with “valid” 
syllogisms and another with “paradox reasoning”. 
Two indicative examples follow: 
A) Concerning the class “valid”, the following 
statements were shown to each participant: “All men 
are animals. All animals are mortal. Hence, all men 
are mortal.” 
B) Concerning the class “paradox”, the following 
statements were shown to each participant: “A 
moving arrow occupies a certain space at each 
instant. But, when an object occupies a specific 
space, it is motionless. Therefore, the arrow cannot 
simultaneously move and be motionless.” (The 
revised Oxford Translation of Aristotle, 1995). 
Every such sequence of statements, forming a 
reasoning, appeared on the computer monitor 
accompanied by the question “true or false”. The 
duration of the presented sentence was directly 
proportional to the letters involved in each sentence 
as described in Table 1. 
Table 1: Units for magnetic properties. 
Sequence of actions  Duration of actions 
Valid or paradox  sentence 
(visual presentation) 
Duration according to the 
numbers of the letters in the 
sentences e.g. a sentence 
involving 92 letters presented 
11,04sec 
EEG recording  1000ms 
Warning stimulus  100ms 
ERP recording  1sec 
Warning stimulus repetition  100ms 
Response onset  Within 5sec 
Period between response 
completion and onset of 
next sentence presentation 
4-9sec 
Then, the monitor screen went blank for  
1000ms. Next, a sound warning stimulus of 65dB, 
500Hz and 100ms duration was given, followed by 
the same warning stimulus after 900ms. Participants, 
after the second warning stimulus, were asked to 
judge each reasoning as either correct or incorrect. 
In addition, his/hers estimated degree of confidence 
CLASSIFYING EVENT RELATED POTENTIALS FOR VALID AND PARADOX REASONING
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