9 - The emergence of rational thinking in development: Conclusions and future directions

Abstract

Cognitive sophistication concerns whether people who display more complex and sophisticated cognition also tend to give the normative response. Importantly, the issue of stimulus equivalence in developmental samples is much less of a problem in studies that use multiple indicators of cognitive sophistication, not just age differences. These multiple indicators can be used as converging evidence in triangulating developmental trends on rational thinking tasks. Age differences were obtained in childhood and early adolescence in the longitudinal developmental study, but not later in adolescence on all performance-based measures, including cognitive abilities and rational thinking tasks. Resistance to miserly information processing tasks can be used as an additional indicator of cognitive sophistication to correlate with response patterns on rational thinking tasks in developmental samples. Although such tasks do measure other aspects of process and knowledge (cognitive ability and numeracy), they also tap in part the participant’s ability to detect conflicts between normatively correct responses and rapidly emitted Type 1 processing. Task factors, particularly the process and knowledge demands of each rational thinking task, also contribute to explaining developmental patterns on these tasks. Identifying sources of cognitive failures on rational thinking tasks in children and youth can be mapped onto real-world correlates and provide new directions for training of these skills and abilities.