The Wason Card Sorting Experiment: Further information

Basic introductory remarks

Our intention this week is to collect some data on three versions of the Wason Card Selection task.

There is probably little point in having you attempt the experiment because we have ‘given the game away’ by providing you with the answer to the classic version. Therefore we would hope that you will be able to test your own participant and then submit the data to our server. Summaries of the data will then be made available towards the end of the course.

Further information regarding collecting data in the selection task can be accessed via the following link to a folder on our google drive, or downloaded from the bottom of the page:

Here is a direct link to the google drive and further information

Here is the explicit link to copy and paste into a new browser tab:

http://bit.ly/2L28mVv

The drive contains complete instructions about how to set up and run the experiment and how to score the data.

Further information

We intend to collect data on three versions of the task:

• Version 1 is the version we have just discussed, and we will call this the Abstract version of the task.

• Version 2 we will call the Concrete version of the task and it’s all about travelling to various destinations by various modes of transport.

• Version 3 we will call the Drinking version of the task it’s all about checking whether alcohol drinkers are of a legal age in a public bar.

Previous research suggests that the ability to home in on the correct answer increases across these three versions of the task. Because there has been some contradictory evidence on this point our intention here is to see what the basic effects actually are.

Check out this further instructional video about how to run the experiment: