ABSTRACT
Cheng and Holyoak (1985) proposed that the content of a conditional rule cues one of several "pragmatic reasoning schemas (PRS)." A "permission schema," for instance, is cued if the rule relates an "action" to a "precondition" in one of four ways. A permission schema specifies a production rule for each of the four possible antecedents (cards) (p. 397):
Subjects Ninety-three students from the University of Konstanz participated in the experiment. Students were paid volunteers, recruited by advertisement from a broad spectrum of disciplines, including biology, law, linguistics, management, mathematics, and psychology. There were 58 female and 35 male students with a mean age of 22.6 years (standard deviation: 2.9 years, range 19-36 years). None of the subjects had any prior experience with the selection task.
