The development of conditional reasoning skills.

Abstract

A 5-trial social-conditional reasoning task was administered to 20 children at each of ages 3, 4, 5, and 6 years. The results, based on four convergent measures, indicated that by 4 years of age children are able to reason from a premise to its logical conclusion in reasoning about the probable behavior of others. The results are discussed in terms of a component model of this ability as applied to real-world social situations. By 4 years of age, in relatively simple situations, children demonstrate such abilities as perspective taking (Mossier, Marvin, & Greenberg, 1976), conservation of number (Miller, Heldmeyer, & Miller, 1975), and simple transitive inferences (Riley & Trabasso, 1974). However, there still remains a paucity of data regarding early logical reasoning skills, and there is some controversy in the literature as to the criteria for determining their presence (Riley & Trabasso, 1974). Reese and Shack (1974) convincingly argue for the use of multiple convergent measures as criteria for demonstrating a particular ability. In this study we investigated preschooler's abilities to engage in a simple social-conditional reasoning task—the ability to reason from a premise to its logical conclusion. In this task the child is presented with one characteristic of an experimenter. The child is asked which of two possible activities the experimenter would want to engage in, only one being logically implied by the stated characteristic. This study complies with the methodological suggestion of Reese and Shack (1974) by using four measures of task performance: (a) judgment; (b) verbal justification; (c) latency to response (processing time); and (d) a nonsense trial where the premise does not logically imply either of the choices presented. The nonsense trial was designed to differentiate between children who operate from a premise and those who do not. Children who operate from a premise should take significantly longer to answer the nonsense question than they did for the previous logical questions. In addition, in re