Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study examined the effects of selection instruction and thematic content on subjects' reasoning performance on the Wason card selection task. Facilitation has frequently been demonstrated when subjects arc instructed to check for violations of a conditional rule that involves thematic content. We noted that the thematic rules previously used are also pragmatic rules that express regulations. We compared reasoning about two kinds of thematic rules: pragmatic and nonpragmatic. Subjects were instructed either to determine if the rule has been violated or to determine if the rule is true or false. The results indicate an interaction between instruction type and thematic rule type. Contrary to previous findings of facilitation on thematic materials with violation instructions, we found facilitation for true/false instructions relative to violation instructions on non-pragmatic content rules. These results stand in contrast to previous descriptions of true/false instructions as more difficult and cognitively demanding than violation instructions. We explain our findings in terms of differences in the inherent status of the two types of thematic rules.