How do pre-adolescent children interpret conditionals?

Abstract

Studies examining children's basic understanding of conditionals have led to very different conclusions. On the one hand, conditional inference tasks suggest that young children are able to interpret familiar conditionals in a complex manner. In contrast, truth-table tasks suggest that before adolescence, children have limited (conjunctive) representations of conditionals. We hypothesized that the latter results are due to use of what are essentially arbitrary conditionals. To examine this, we gave a truth-table task using two kinds of conditional rules, Arbitrary and Imaginary categorical rules (If an animal is a bori, then it has red wings) to 9-and 12-yearolds. Results with the Arbitrary rules were consistent with those found in previous studies, with the most frequent interpretation being the Conjunctive one. However, among even the youngest children, the most frequent interpretation of the Imaginary categorical rules was the defective conditional, which is only found with much older adolescents with Arbitrary rules. These results suggest that working memory limitations are not an important developmental factor in how young children interpret conditional rules.

Specificity effects in reasoning with counterintuitive and arbitrary conditionals

“…By not describing any meaningful relationship between antecedent and consequent, researchers aim to capture people’s pure reasoning competence (e.g., Evans et al, 1993 ; Markovits et al, 2019 ; Noveck et al, 2004 ). Accordingly, such conditionals often have been used to investigate developmental trends in reasoning (Barrouillet & Lecas, 1998 , 1999 ; Markovits & Barrouillet, 2002 ; but see Markovits et al, 2016 ). We do not want to deny here that most arbitrary conditionals may indeed be less prone to content effects.…”

Metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive strategies of gifted and average children on dealing with deductive reasoning task

“…However, more detailed and more thorough expositions on the subject show that this approach -apart from its application on relational reasoning -has also been successful in explaining many other cognitive phenomena, such as syllogistic and conditional reasoning, using abductions and quantifiers on thinking, refuting false conclusions through counterexamples etc. (Barrouillet et al, 2008;Gauffroy & Barrouillet, 2009;Hattori, 2016;Johnson-Laird, 2006;Markovits et al, 2016). It has been also suggested, that the ability to deal with spatial arrangements in one's mind is very helpful for all kinds of reasoning that involves transitive relations (Pinker, 2009; in logical calculus, the transitivity denotes the property that if A is related to B and B is related to C, than A is related to C; Schmidt, 2011).…”

“…In view of the focus of this study on primary school children, it is also necessary to mention the developmental aspects of mental model theory. Although a bulk of research within this paradigm has been carried out with adult participants, some important studies dealing with pre-adolescent or even pre-school children also exist (Bucciarelli et al, 2018;Markovits, 2000;Markovits et al, 2016). Their findings are all the more important with regard to the long known fact that the capacity of children's working memory is markedly limited in comparison with adults and it only gradually increases during the years of school attendance (Schneider & Pressley, 2013).…”