Can young children integrate premises in transitivity and serial order tasks?

Abstract

An analysis is presented of the relational information needed for premise integration in transitivity and simple serial order tasks. The tasks are divided into those where an ordering decision can be made by considering a single binary relation, and those where two binary relations must be considered. Four experiments are reported, the principal purpose of which is to manipulate the number of relations which must be considered in making decisions about the order of a small set of elements. In every test it was found that preschool children succeeded if decisions could be made by considering one relation, but failed if two relations had to be considered. Children over 5 almost always succeeded in both cases. It is concluded that preschool children cannot integrate relational premise information, and therefore cannot understand transitivity or serial order. This would impose limitations on their understanding of quantification and a number of other concepts. It is also suggested that the amount of information required to make a single decision may be an important factor determining cognitive complexity generally.