Wason Selection Task

The aim of the project is to investigate the subjects’ understanding of the Wason selection task and it’s modifications proposed by Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen.

Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen proposed certain modifications to the Wason selection task in abstract setting, which were to facilitate classically normatively correct answers among the subjects. However, in our replication of their experiments it turned out that in some cases those modifications supress the number of classical interpretations. This project is aimed at revealing the subjects’ understanding of the tasks by means of series of Socratic dialogues. Dialogues are carried out with the use of the deep standardisation technique. We employed Stenning and van Lambalgen’s five versions of the Wason selection task with two conditions: in the first one cards presented to the subjects supported the rule given in the task, while in the second one they did not. Subjects were divided into two groups with respect to expertise in formal logic. As a result a corpus will be created for further analyses.

The project was partially supported by the Institute of Pychology AMU Grant for young scientists “Czy myślimy logicznie? Replikacja badań van Lambalgena i Stenninga”.

People: Andrzej Gajda, Szymon Chlebowski, Mariusz Urbański, Emilia Soroko

Conferences: