The Assessment of Children's Understanding of Inclusion Relations: Transitivity, Asymmetry, and Quantification

Transitivity for height versus speed: To what extent do the under-7s really have a transitive capacity?

“…This is because, applying a recently developed "Dual-Process" conception of reasoning, anticipates that extensive-training benefits a species-general Associative System, whilst the Spatial-Paradigm and 3-Term-Paradigm can potentially index a genuinely-Deductive System which has always been the target of transitive research. Deduction allows us to engage in quite complex problem-solving activities, but may sometimes form part of more routine unconscious or automatic thinking (Deneault & Ricard, 2006;Klaczynski, 2009;Muller, Sokol & Overton, 1999). Perhaps one of the most basic forms of deductive inference-making both in adults and in children is Transitive Reasoning (Bara, Bucciarelli & Lombardo, 2000;Halford, Wilson & Phillips, 1998;Lazareva & Wasserman, 2010).…”

What’s in the name? Or how rocks and stones are different from bunnies and rabbits

“…One way of reconciling results emerging from studies that used identical and taxonomically related labels is to assume that children's difficulty in reasoning with taxonomic labels stems not from the lack of understanding that labels denote categories but rather from the lack of understanding of class inclusion relations, which children do not generally demonstrate before they reach 7 or 8 years of age (Deneault & Ricard, 2006;Greene, 1994;Inhelder & Piaget, 1964;Johnson et al, 1997;Klahr & Wallace, 1972)-the same age at which children become capable of relying on taxonomically related labels in the course of induction. A straightforward prediction that follows from this assumption is that children younger than 7 or 8 years of age should be successful in performing generalization tasks with nonidentical labels if these labels denote entities at the same level of taxonomic hierarchy.…”

Testing for Transitive Class Containment as a Feature of Hierarchical Classification

“…Both asymmetry and property inheritance appear to be more complex patterns of behavior than transitive class containment. Deneault and Ricard (2006) found that most 5‐year‐olds could respond correctly to probes for transitive class containment but not for asymmetry whereas most 9‐year‐olds responded correctly to both. With regard to property inheritance, there has been relatively less work conducted on this than on the other features of hierarchical classification, but it seems functionally more similar to asymmetry than to transitive class containment in at least one important respect.…”

“…For example, all dogs are warm‐blooded, but not all mammals have four legs. Cognitive developmental research typically uses qualitative inferential questions to assess the extent to which children of different ages begin to respond in accordance with different features of hierarchical classification (Deneault & Ricard, 2006; Greene, 1989; 1994; Winer, 1980). For example, a question probing transitive class containment might be, “All Springer spaniels are dogs, and all dogs are mammals; are all Springer spaniels mammals?” By analyzing responses to questions such as this, researchers have attempted to establish at what age and in what order the features of hierarchical responding emerge.…”