This paper was presented at "The European Conference on Cognitive Science. Siena, Italy, October 1999"This experiment explores the influence of thematic content, the presence or
absence of a scenario and the use of deontic or indicative framing of
conditional rules on performance on Wason’s selection task. Logical
performance was affected by the content used (permission rules were the
best, neutral the worst and obligation rules intermediate) and by the use of
scenarios. The scenario effect interacted significantly with the problem
framing such that the presence of a scenario facilitate performance only
when problems were framed in a deontic rather than indicative manner.
The presence of scenarios did not interact with the problem content. These
results are discussed in terms of pragmatic influences on reasoning, within
the framework of the Dual Process Theory (Evans & Over, 1996
