Department of Educational Psychology

 

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

December 1978

Comments

Published in British Journal of Psychology 69 (1978), pp. 371–372. Copyright © 1978 British Psychological Society. Used by permission. http://www.bps.org.uk/publications/journals/bjp/bjp_home.cfm

Abstract

In a recent article in this Journal, Brée & Coppens (1976) tested Brée’s (1973) model of performance on Wason’s extensively studied “four-card task.” The Brée model is of considerable interest in that it (a) differentiates comprehension of the proposition to be tested from the hypothesis- testing strategy itself (as do Smalley, 1974, and Moshman, 1977), and (b) is closely related to Piaget’s theory of formal operations (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958) in its consideration of combinatorial analysis (elaboration of possibilities) and hypothetico-deductive reasoning (reasoning based on possibilities rather than facts). Unfortunately, the test of the model is marred both by incorrect predictions and questionable exclusion of subjects from the data analysis.

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