Three new versions of Wason’s 2-4-6 rule discovery task incorporating error rates or feedback of uncertainty reduction, inspired by the error-statistical account in philosophy of science, were employed. In experiments 1 and 2, participants were instructed that some experimenter feedback would be erroneous (control was original 2-4-6 without error). The results showed that performance was impaired when there was probabilistic error. In experiment 3, participants were given uncertainty reduction feedback as they generated different number triples and the negative effects of probabilistic error were not observed. These findings are informative not only about rule discovery tasks in general but also about contexts of inference under uncertainty.

根据科学哲学中的错误统计说明，采用了Wason的2-4-6规则发现任务的三个新版本，其中包含错误率或不确定性减少的反馈。在实验1和2中，指示参与者一些实验者的反馈将是错误的（控件是原始的2-4-6，没有错误）。结果表明，当出现概率错误时，性能会受到损害。在实验3中，为参与者提供了减少不确定性的反馈，因为他们生成了不同的三元组数，并且未观察到概率误差的负面影响。这些发现不仅对一般的规则发现任务具有指导意义，而且对不确定性下的推理环境也具有指导意义。