THE DIFFICULTY OF AN IMPLICATION TASK

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Abstract
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.

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