Emergence of higher-order transitivity across development: The importance of local task difficulty

This study investigates the effect of local task difficulty on children's tendency to combine pieces of information into larger wholes. The particular hypothesis is that the emergence of higher-order Gestalts is guided neither by innate capabilities nor by laborious thought processes. Instead, it is - at least partly - tied to the difficult of the local task, adaptively allowing the mind to reduce cognitive demand. The higher-order Gestalt used here was the transitive congruence among three feature relations. And the local task was to remember two of the feature relations from brief exposures, after having learned the third relation to criterion. The two to-be-learned relations violated transitivity with the third relation, such that a bias toward higher-order transitivity could be determined on the basis of children's performance mistakes. Importantly, the two to-be-learned relations either matched in direction (posing a low cognitive demand), or they had opposite directions (posting higher cognitive demand). Results show that 5- to 9-year-olds were affected by higher-order transitivity only in the locally difficult task, not when the local task was easy.

[1]  S. Carey,et al.  Predicting the outcomes of physical events: two-year-olds fail to reveal knowledge of solidity and support. , 2000, Child development.

[2]  Annette Karmiloff-Smith,et al.  Children's problem solving , 1984 .

[3]  R. Kimchi.  Children's perceptual organisation of hierarchical visual patterns , 1990 .

[4]  Heidi Kloos,et al.  PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Research Article When Looks Are Everything Appearance Similarity Versus Kind Information in Early Induction , 2022 .

[5]  H Abdi,et al.  Theory-based correlations and their role in children's concepts. , 1993, Child development.

[6]  T. Ruffman.  Children's Understanding of Logical Inconsistency , 1999 .

[7]  B. Inhelder,et al.  If you want to get ahead, get a theory , 1975, Cognition.

[8]  Rochel Gelman,et al.  Structural Constraints on Cognitive Development: Introduction to a Special Issue of Cognitive Science , 1990, Cogn. Sci..

[9]  C. Mervis,et al.  Early object labels: the case for a developmental lexical principles framework , 1994, Journal of Child Language.

[10]  E. Spelke,et al.  Origins of knowledge. , 1992, Psychological review.

[11]  Daniel N. Osherson,et al.  Language and the ability to evaluate contradictions and tautologies , 1975, Cognition.

[12]  T. Trabasso,et al.  Comparatives, logical structures, and encoding in a transitive inference task. , 1974 .

[13]  Bridget A. Franks,et al.  Development of the Concept of Inferential Validity. , 1986 .

[14]  H. Kloos.  Interlinking physical beliefs: Children’s bias towards logical congruence , 2007, Cognition.

[15]  J. Mandler,et al.  Separating the sheep from the goats: Differentiating global categories , 1991, Cognitive Psychology.

[16]  Linda B. Smith,et al.  A developmental analysis of the polar structure of dimensions , 1992, Cognitive Psychology.

[17]  E. Markman,et al.  Categories and induction in young children , 1986, Cognition.

[18]  J. Stevenson.  The cultural origins of human cognition , 2001 .

[19]  T. Trabasso,et al.  Transitive Inferences and Memory in Young Children , 1971, Nature.

[20]  K. Springer.  Acquiring a naive theory of kinship through inference. , 1995, Child development.

[21]  Bradley J. Morris,et al.  Children's solutions of logical versus empirical problems: What's missing and what develops? , 2001 .

[22]  Megan J. Bulloch,et al.  Causal relations drive young children’s induction, naming, and categorization , 2007, Cognition.

[23]  F. Heider.  The psychology of interpersonal relations , 1958 .

[24]  Logical competence and transitive inference in young children , 1978 .

[25]  Frank C. Keil,et al.  An abstract to concrete shift in the development of biological thought: the insides story , 1995, Cognition.

[26]  E. Spelke,et al.  Ontological categories guide young children's inductions of word meaning: Object terms and substance terms , 1991, Cognition.

[27]  S. Gelman.  The development of induction within natural kind and artifact categories , 1988, Cognitive Psychology.

[28]  Damian G. Stephen,et al.  Dynamics of representational change: entropy, action, and cognition. , 2009, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.