According to Geary's evolutionary approach, humans are able to easily acquire primary knowledge and, with more efforts, secondary knowledge. The present study investigates how primary knowledge contents can facilitate the learning of formal logical rules, i.e., secondary knowledge. Framing formal logical problems in evolutionary salient contexts…

Sixty-four high school students, stratified by field-dependent or independent cognitive style, were randomly assigned to homogeneous or heterogeneous groups of four to attain concepts in the sequence of complex to simple or simple to complex, with either minimal or strategy instructions. Subsequently, each student individually attained four…