I think reasoning is thinking thru your problems and coming up with reasons that you might want to go this way or that way. Subconcious reasoning is different in that you need to come up with decision quickly and perhaps feelings and past experiences play a part in that process. Relying on your gut feelings comes to mind.

Maybe:

if(I'm on fire)
if(water is nearby)
if(I'm mobile)
go get water and pour over my body

and/or

if(I'm on fire)
if(I can lay on ground)
if(ground is unobstructed)
roll on the ground

Now, the most important thing to take from the example is that when you're inexperienced you don't know which one to take. Perhaps try the water then the rolling on ground method or do it in reverse. You can't trust your reason without past experience. So you take a gamble now. Notice something else, there is a rule for fire here. If you know the fact that fire needs oxygen to sustain itself (along with fuel) then to cut off this oxygen you can apply water ie. liquid or sand or roll on ground. But you need to know that about a fire first. You might make logical jump by saying that rolling on floor doesn't let oxygen into fire and that would be like pouring water over yourself. Thus even if you have the facts you can combine various facts to come up with new ways to solve a problem. I think these ideas are spur of the moment type things so your AI would have to create these associations in real time. No wonder this processing takes time when you're under fire. Reminds me of a deer in headlights situation.

Within AI at least, there are actually several different sorts of reasoning. Philosophically speaking there is inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning. The over-arching theme is the production of new information, or the revision of beliefs in a piece of information, held by an agent/entity/thing. This may include the assimilation of observations from a domain or it may be completely internal, relying on the hypothesis of new information ("what would be the result of *this* happening?). Typically such reasoning is assumed to rely on a Logic, which provides rules for manipulating information.

There's plenty of literature out there, from methods for computational reasoning (AI) to philosophical works on the nature of reasoning (and whether it's possible; c.f., Hume on the problem of Induction)

Enjoy!

Cheers,

Timkin