Facilitation in the Abstract Selection Task: The Effects of Attentional and Instructional Factors

The present study examined performance on Wason's four-card abstract selection task. Baseline performance is very poor, usually less than 10% correct; and this task has a long record of resistance to facilitation. It was hypothesized that the two primary sources of difficulty are selective encoding of the problem information and the lack of satisfactory analytic processing. Three experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, performance was improved by explicating the implication rule. The majority of subjects, however, still failed to make the correct selection. Subjects were required in Experiment 2 to provide reasons for their selection or non-selection of each of the cards. This response procedure, paired with an explicated rule, led to further improvements in performance (over 50% correct selections). In Experiment 3, the influence of the type of selection instruction (true-false vs. violation) was examined. Paired with an explicated rule and the reasons response format, violation instructions led to one of the highest correct selection rates ever observed for any version of the selection task: over 80% correct. Because of the importance of this result, it was replicated twice. The results of these three experiments are discussed in terms of Johnson-Laird and Byrne's mental models theory and Evans's two-stage model of reasoning.

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