Temporality and inclusion relations: conditional rule processing in selection task and its difficulties

Abstract

Some versions of Peter Wason’s four-cards selection task are executed correctly by experimental subjects, but other versions are not. In this paper, I try to explain this problem and I argue that subjects select logically valid cards when the versions have (i) a temporal rule or (ii) a rule with a term that can be understood as subset of the other term. Thus, I hold problems of Wason’s task are not logical inference problems, but problems about construction of mental representations process.