Trial-by-trial strategy assessments and a microgenetic design were used to examine the learning of rules for solving balance scale problems by 70 4- and 70 5-year olds. Developmental differences in learning that emerged seemed to reflect both distal and proximal influences. Encoding and initial rule use were related to different learning process…

Two experiments tested predictions from a theory in which processing load depends on relational complexity (RC), the number of variables related in a single decision. Tasks from six domains (transitivity, hierarchical classification, class inclusion, cardinality, relative-clause sentence comprehension, and hypothesis testing) were administered to…