Children's solutions for figural matrices: Developmental differences in strategies and effects of matrix characteristics

Abstract

Two experiments investigated children's strategies for solving geometric matrices which were correctly or incorrectly completed and varied in number of elements (1 to 3) and number of transformations (0 to 2). Experiment 1 tested ninety 7-, 10-, and 13-year-old boys and girls on working memory, spatial reasoning, and the Raven's and geometric matrices. The 7-year-olds were less accurate than the older children and 10-year-olds were slower than 13-year-olds. That the older children increased latency to solution with increased item complexity, while the youngest did so only up to three “feature” matrices suggests developmental differences in exhaustiveness of strategies. However, on certain matrices all subjects demonstrated premature self-termination. Experiment 2 was conducted with thirty 10-year-olds and focused on such matrix characteristics as nature of falseness and whether the transformation was addition, expansion, or circular motion. Premature self-termination was especially evident in expansion matrices with an incorrect nontransforming element. Inadequacy of encoding appeared to explain relatively slow response latencies and poor accuracy on circular motion matrices. Individual differences in perceptual abilities of disembedding and spatial reasoning were also seen to play a role in matrix performance.