Final answer:
Performance is better for the "real world" task of the Wason four-card problem compared to the abstract task.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question is asking about the performance of students when comparing the "abstract" version of the Wason four-card problem to a "real world" version of the problem. The Wason four-card problem is a logic puzzle that involves four cards with different letters or numbers on each side. In the abstract version, the cards are represented by letters or numbers, while in the real-world version, the cards may represent objects like beer, soda, or ages. The question asks whether performance is better for the real-world task, the abstract task, the same for both tasks, or if the performance of the abstract task improves over the real-world task.
The answer to this question is that 1) performance is better for the "real world" task. Research has shown that people tend to perform better on the "real world" version of the Wason four-card problem compared to the abstract version. This is because the real-world version allows for more contextual and meaningful information to be used in the reasoning process. When the problem is presented in a familiar context, like beer, soda, and ages, people are able to make better inferences and deductions.
One example of this is a study conducted by Wason himself in 1960. In this study, participants performed better on a version of the Wason four-card problem that had a real-world context compared to an abstract version. This suggests that the inclusion of real-world context improves performance on the task.