Verbal mediation underlying inductive reasoning: Cognitive tempo differences

Abstract

A verbal mediation strategy underlying successful inductive reasoning and its differential utilization by impulsive and reflective children was explored. Eighty children ( M age = 11.17) were identified as impulsive or reflective and subsequently administered an inductive reasoning task composed of figural matrices. The two cognitive tempo groups were equally distributed across four independent conditions intended to differentially encourage a verbal mediation strategy: standard administration or control (C), constrained nonverbal attention (A), experimenter-provided verbal cues (EL), and subject-elicited verbal cues (SL). These groups were given two task administrations: no verbal interference in Session 1 and verbal interference (i.e., concurrent word shadowing) in Session 2. The hypothesized verbal mediation strategy would be supported most clearly by a differential decrement in performance in the verbal conditions caused by the addition of verbal interference. Both impulsives and reflectives exhibited higher accuracy and lengthened response times in the EL and SL conditions without interference. However, only reflectives in the SL group demonstrated disrupted performance (decreased accuracy and shortened latency) with the verbal interference. It is proposed that reflectives may have incorporated the verbal labels into a covert verbal mediation strategy, whereas impulsives utilized the cues to construct a visual mental representation.