The lack of research exploring the influence of dynamic visual narratives on inference skills prompted the present study with an aim to profile the inference skills in school children between the ages of 6 years and 9 years 11 months using dynamic visual narratives. A total of 80 participants were considered for the study. An animated story was…

Novel causal systems pose a problem of variable choice: How can a reasoner decide which variable is causally relevant? Which variable in the system should a learner manipulate to try to produce a desired, yet unfamiliar, casual outcome? In much causal reasoning research, participants learn how a particular set of preselected variables produce a…

During communication, conversational partners should offer as much information as is required and relevant. For instance, the statement "Some Xs Y" is infelicitous if one knows that all Xs Y. Do children understand the link between speaker knowledge and utterance strength? In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds (N = 32) but not 4-year-olds…

Higher-order thinking is relational reasoning in which multiple representations are linked together, through inferences, comparisons, abstractions, and hierarchies. We examine the development of higher-order thinking in 64 preschool-aged children, observed from 14 to 58 months in naturalistic situations at home. We used children's spontaneous talk…

Analogical reasoning is essential for transfer by supporting recognition of relational similarity. However, not all analogies are created equal. The source and target can be similar (near), or quite different (far). Previous research suggests that close comparisons facilitate children's relational abstraction. On the other hand, evidence from…

Social essentialism, the belief that members of certain social categories share unobservable properties, licenses expectations that those categories are natural and a good basis for inference. A challenge for cognitive developmental theory is to give an account of how children come to develop essentialist beliefs about socially important…

How likely is the glass to break, given that it is heated? The present study asks questions such as this with or without the premise "if the glass is heated, it breaks." A reduced problem (question without premise) measures the statistical dependency (conditional probability) of an event to occur, given that another has occurred. Such…

A rich tradition in developmental psychology explores physical reasoning in infancy. However, no research to date has investigated whether infants can reason about physical objects that behave probabilistically, rather than deterministically. Physical events are often quite variable, in that similar-looking objects can be placed in similar…

In three studies, 5-10-year-old children and an adult comparison group judged another's certainty in making inductive inferences and guesses. Participants observed a puppet make strong inductions, weak inductions, and guesses. Participants either had no information about the correctness of the puppet's conclusion, knew that the puppet was correct,…

The present study focused on children's deductive reasoning when performing the Latin Square Task, an experimental task designed to explore the influence of relational complexity. Building on Birney, Halford, and Andrew's (2006) research, we created a version of the task that minimized nonrelational factors and introduced new categories of items.…

Assessed 3- to 7-year-old children's sensitivity to logical necessity by contrasting performance in insufficient and sufficient information conditions. A search task used in Experiments 1 and 2 allowed children to search for additional information in insufficient conditions. A judgement condition used in Experiment 2 required a "can't tell"…

In Study 1, 10-, 13-, and 16-year-olds were assigned to conditions in which they were instructed to think logically and provided alternative antecedents to the consequents of conditional statements. Providing alternatives improved reasoning on two uncertain logical forms, but decreased logical responding on two certain forms; logic instructions…

This study investigated the development of the understanding of class inclusion in children age 5, 7, and 9 years, whose performance on a qualitative class-inference task assessing their appreciation of the transitive and asymmetrical nature of inclusive relations within the animal domain was compared with their ability to make quantitative…

Psychologists know that reasoning human beings do not spontaneously follow the rules of formal logic when using implication. Addressing this phenomenon, Piaget employed the concept of "significant implication," which exists when the meaning of a subsequent proposition is "included" in the meaning of an earlier one, and is not…

Used single-subject analyses to examine the developmental difficulty of the ulterior motive question (the backward inverse inference) in five- and seven-year-olds. Results suggest that children's difficulties with ulterior motive information result both from the abstract nature and the logical form of the task. (Author/SKC)