Premium
THE DIFFICULTY OF AN IMPLICATION TASK
Author(s) -
BRÉE DAVID S.,
COPPENS GEORGE
Publication year - 1976
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1976.tb01549.x
Subject(s) - task (project management) , psychology , proposition , set (abstract data type) , cognitive psychology , cognition , test (biology) , computer science , linguistics , neuroscience , paleontology , philosophy , management , economics , biology , programming language
An experiment was conducted to distinguish between two cognitive processing models that attempt to account for the difficulty of a reasoning task. The task requires that subjects select the appropriate cards to test the proposition ‘if on one half of the card there is a vowel, then there is an even digit on the other half', when only one‐half of each card is visible. Few subjects select the correct cards. Johnson‐Laird & Wason (1970) put forward a model suggesting that the difficulty is due to a set for verification, i.e. that subjects select cards that could conform to the proposition rather than those which could disconfirm it. An alternative model (Brée, 1973) attributes the difficulty to a failure to hypothesize, i.e. to a lack of consideration of the possible hidden symbols. Only 2 out of 24 subjects in the experiment failed to conform to a prediction of the latter model, which the former model was not able to make.