Executive Functions and Improvement of Thinking: An Intervention Program to Enhance Deductive Reasoning Abilities

Abstract Empirical and theoretical advances and application to society are moved at different speed. Application work is frequently developed later because it requires the integration of knowledge from different research areas. In the present paper, we integrate literature coming from diverse areas of research in order to design a deductive reasoning intervention, based on the involved executive functions. Executive functions include working memory (WM)’s online executive processes and other off-line functions such as task revising and planning. Deductive reasoning is a sequential thinking process driven by reasoners’ meta-deductive knowledge and goals that requires the construction and manipulation of representations. We present a new theoretical view about the relationship between executive function and higher-level thinking, a critical analysis of the possibilities and limitations of cognitive training, and a metacognitive training procedure on executive functions to improve deductive reasoning. This procedure integrates direct instruction on deduction and meta-deductive concepts (consistency, necessity) and strategies (search for counterexamples and exhaustivity), together with the simultaneous training of WM and executive functions involved: Focus and switch attention, update WM representations, inhibit and revise intuitive responses, and control the emotional stress yielded by tasks. Likewise, it includes direct training of some complex WM tasks that demands people to carry out similar cognitive assignment than deduction. Our training program would be included in the school curriculum and attempts not only to improve deductive reasoning in experimental tasks, but also to increase students’ ability to uncover fallacies in discourse, to automatize some basic logical skills, and to be able to use logical intuitions.