Transitivity and Emergent Sequence Performances in Young Children

Abstract

Children taught to sequence pairs of visual stimuli also performed additional sequences without direct training. In Experiment 1, the children were trained to produce a six-stimulus sequence (A > B > C > D > E > F) with one set of forms, and five overlapping two-stimulus sequences (A > B, B > C, C > D, D > E, and E > F) with another set of forms. Few of the children succeeded on tests for the untrained two- (e.g., B > D and B > E) and six-stimulus sequences derivable from the two-stimulus training. The children in Experiments 2 and 3 received only the overlapping sequence training before testing with refined protocols: Nearly all succeeded on tests of emergent sequences involving two, three, four, five, and six stimuli. The results suggest methods for examining transitive relations between pairs of the stimuli used in training and the development of a relation of order among all six of the stimuli involved.