Visual Cues for Logical Reasoning about Text Enhance Metacognitive Sensitivity

An important part of critical thinking is analyzing the logical structure of inferences made in text, such as checking whether if–then rules appearing in legal regulations or scientific arguments are applied correctly. Metacognitive sensitivity, defined as feeling confident about one's correct answers and uncertain about incorrect ones, is an indispensable component of such assessments because it supports the reliable identification of unstated assumptions and flawed conclusions. In this paper, we explore how visual cues can foster metacognitive sensitivity during the different phases of reasoning in logical inference tasks. We propose a visual cueing framework based on findings from deductive reasoning psychology and multimedia learning. The cues highlight premises and conclusions of problems stated in natural language, and visualize the extracted sequences of conditional statements as diagrams to guide viewers' attention to common invalid inferences. Results from an empirical study (N =164) demonstrate that users exhibit significantly greater metacognitive sensitivity with such visual cues than without.