Traces of reasoning with pragmatic schemas

Holyoak and Cheng's (1995) account of Wason's (1966) selection task was evaluated by testing participants' recognition memory for the rule. To accommodate the finding that participants' selections are systematically influenced by manipulating their perspective on the rule to be tested, Holyoak and Cheng put forward a development of Pragmatic Reasoning Schema (PRS) theory, according to which the rule being tested is mapped onto different schematic rules depending on the perspective taken. The instantiated schema then becomes the basis for reasoning, and the different schemas encourage the selection of different cases. We hypothesised that if participants interpret the rule by instantiating a particular schema, then they should falsely recognise a sentence corresponding to the instantiated schema a short time after performing the task. An experimental test provided limited support for this hypothesis.