Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Do people reason on the Wason selection task?
T2 - A new look at the data of Ball et al. (2003)
AU - Evans, Jonathan St. B. T.
AU - Ball, Linden J.
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Despite the popularity of the Wason selection task in the psychology of reasoning, doubt remains as to whether card choices actually reflect a process of reasoning. One view is that while participants reason about the cards and their hidden sidesas indicated by protocol analysisthis reasoning merely confabulates explanations for cards that were preconsciously cued. This hypothesis has apparently been supported by studies that show that participants predominantly inspect cards which they end up selecting. In this paper, we reanalyse the data of one such study, which used eye-movement tracking to record card inspection times (Ball, Lucas, Miles, Gale, 2003). We show that while cards favoured by matching bias are inspected for roughly equal lengths of times, their selection rates are strongly affected by their logical status. These findings strongly support a two-stage account in which attention is necessary but not sufficient for card selections. Hence, reasoning does indeed affect participants' choices on this task.
AB - Despite the popularity of the Wason selection task in the psychology of reasoning, doubt remains as to whether card choices actually reflect a process of reasoning. One view is that while participants reason about the cards and their hidden sidesas indicated by protocol analysisthis reasoning merely confabulates explanations for cards that were preconsciously cued. This hypothesis has apparently been supported by studies that show that participants predominantly inspect cards which they end up selecting. In this paper, we reanalyse the data of one such study, which used eye-movement tracking to record card inspection times (Ball, Lucas, Miles, Gale, 2003). We show that while cards favoured by matching bias are inspected for roughly equal lengths of times, their selection rates are strongly affected by their logical status. These findings strongly support a two-stage account in which attention is necessary but not sufficient for card selections. Hence, reasoning does indeed affect participants' choices on this task.
KW - Reasoning
KW - Wason selection task
KW - Matching bias
KW - INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES
KW - INSPECTION TIMES
KW - RELEVANCE
KW - CONDITIONALS
KW - SUPPRESSION
KW - INFERENCE
U2 - 10.1080/17470210903398147
DO - 10.1080/17470210903398147
M3 - Journal article
VL - 63
SP - 434
EP - 441
JO - The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
JF - The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
SN - 1747-0218
IS - 3
ER -