The Influence of Semantic and Pragmatic Factors in Wason’s Selection Task: State of the Art

Abstract

One of the cognitive processes, which has generated more research within the framework of the Psychology of thinking, is human reasoning. Throughout the history of the Psychology of reasoning , one of the experimental tasks most frequently used to study how subjects reason, and why they make mistakes, is the Wason's selection task or the four card problem (Wason, 1966, 1968). This work presents the current state of the experimental research on this task, using as a common thread the empirical studies which have highlighted the plasticity of reasoning towards semantic and pragmatic factors.