Reasoning with thematic selection task

Abstract

Peter Wason (1966, 1968) designed one of the experimental tasks most used by the cognitive psychologists to study how subjects reason: the selection task. The main objective of this work is to present some of the experimental studies on this task that there have analyzed the role of semantic and pragmatic variables, such as the content of the rule, the context, the empirical knowledge or the experience of the subjects. In addition, the principal theoretical explanations on the task will be described: The Theory of Pragmatic Reasoning Schemas, the Social Contract Theory, the Heuristic-Analytic and the Double Process Theories and the Mental Models Theory (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991; 2002). We focus on the last one, that is the main framework in which professor García Madruga developed his research on reasoning during decades. He is a key reference for the authors from the eighties and it is a pleasure for us to have this opportunity of honouring him