Conditional Reasoning in People with Delusions: Performance on the Wason Selection Task

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Abstract
People with delusions have been shown to reason differently to nondeluded subjects, and such differences are even present on tasks that bear no relationship to the content of the delusional belief. We were interested in exploring the extent of this reasoning difference. In particular, we were interested in what the effect on reasoning would be if the content of the task was manipulated so that the materials were gradually changed from being neutral to being more realistic in content. To study this we employed perhaps the most widely utilised reasoning paradigm, the Wason selection task. Three groups of people participated in each of two experiments; people with delusions, people with depression, and psychiatrically normal subjects. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented with four Wason selection tasks that were varied in the realism of the content. On three of the conditionals performance between groups was equivalently poor. On the most realistic, and therefore easiest conditional, people with delusions performed worse than the two control groups. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2. A possible role for impairments in working memory is suggested.

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