The Development of Conditional Reasoning: A Mental Model Account

Abstract

Conditional (if-then) reasoning is one of the key components of logical reasoning. Studies examining the way that children and adults make conditional inferences have shown that while there are some clear developmental patterns, there is also a great deal of variation in performance due to factors such as problem content. Such variation is difficult to model without an explicit process model. In the following we propose a variant of mental model theory (Johnson-Laird, 1983) that can explain much of the empirical data. This model suggests that the development of conditional reasoning can be explained, at least partly, by such factors as the capacity of working memory, the range of knowledge available to a reasoner and his/her ability to access this knowledge on-line.