Development of conditional reasoning and Wason's selection task

Abstract

Influent theories on human reasoning have suggested that Wason's selection task is so difficult because it involves heuristic and implicit processes. However, recent studies have demonstrated the implication of deductive activities. Poor performance on this task would thus result from some of its characteristics that impede the use of deductive processes. In the present experiment, we hypothesised that a modified abstract selection task that induces analytic and deductive processes should lead to better performance than the standard version of the task. Moreover, deductive activities are strongly affected by development (Markovits et Barrouillet, 2002). Thus, we predicted a strong developmental increase of performance in the modified task. These hypotheses were confirmed by presenting 13-year olds, 15-year olds and adults with either the standard or a modified selection task in which participants were asked to identify the permissible cards according to the rule and to predict the possible hidden sides of the cards before performing the selection.