This study trained children to master logical fallacies and examined how learning is related to processing efficiency and fluid intelligence (gf). A total of one hundred and eighty 8- and 11-year-old children living in Cyprus were allocated to a control, a limited (LI), and a full instruction (FI) group. The LI group learned the notion of logical…

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult…

This study investigates the responses of 84 children, aged 6 years 3 months to 7 years 5 months, to questions dealing with the categories of physical causality and 2 causal demonstrations. (WY)

The potency of Pascual-Leone's M construct was demonstrated by experimental production of decalages on combinatorial reasoning tasks. Logical and perceptual task characteristics remained constant while the number of variables was varied so that processing demands, relative to processing capacities, were the same for subjects at each of three age…

This study examined the ability of 4-year-old children to understand the propositional components (presuppositions and assertions) of semantically complex propositions and to deduce what such components together imply. (BRT)

Early developmental changes in children's understanding of causality were examined in two studies of three and five year olds' causal judgments. In both studies, children were asked to judge which of two stimuli caused an observed event across a series of problems providing a variety of alternative cues. (Author)

Study attempted to specify two complementary aspects of children's inferential size judgments within the context of Piaget's theory. (Authors)

A modified version of Inhelder's and Piaget's bending-rods task was administered twice in succession to 9-, 11-, and 13-year-olds. Subjects were then categorized as spontaneous, latent, or nonusers of the formal operational control-of-variables strategy according to whether they used the strategy on the first, second, or neither administration.…

The development of children's comprehension of cause and effect relationships was studied in 68 kindergarten, first grade, and second grade children. (BRT)

This study examined 6- to 8-year-old Slovenian children's acquisition of matrix completion proficiency and compared microgenetic and age-related changes on the task. Microgenetic analyses indicated that: variability of children's errors increased before they discovered the correct strategy, the correct strategy became dominant shortly after…

Reports the use of a memory load-interference paradigm and the easy-to-hard paradigm as converging operations to study capacity limitations in five- to six-year-old's reasoning. Concludes that transitive inference ability in children is capacity limited. (HOD)

Reports on two studies during which 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children were interviewed about three different types of regularities or rules: social conventions, physical laws, and logical necessities. Shows that older children made more distinctions between social and nonsocial items than did younger children. (HOD)

Two experiments investigated kindergarten through fourth-graders' and adults' ability to evaluate the certainty of deductive inferences, inductive inferences, and guesses, and explain the origins of inferential knowledge. Findings indicated that children rated their own deductions as more certain than guesses, but when judging another person's…

Three studies used interspecies adoption stories to examine children's understanding of the role of birth in determining animal properties and species identity. Found that most 4- to 7-year olds could reliably judge that babies would be of the same species as birth parents, but were unable to attribute properties of adoptive parents. (Author/KB)