REASONING WITH RAVEN — IN AND OUT OF CONTEXT

Summary. A traditional view of reasoning is of a set of mental processing powers that can be tapped and exemplified independently of content and context. “Abstract” reasoning items such as those in Raven's Progressive Matrices are thus considered to be ideal measures of such processes, and therefore of “intelligence”. A more recent view is that reasoning is recruited through the agency of representations (schemas) constructed in the course of experience, and which are brought to bear on current situations. The latter must be contextually meaningful, or make “human sense”, before the former can be fully tapped. The present study compared reasoning on Raven's items with that on the same items translated into socially meaningful situations (socio-cognitive items). Performance of 9–10 year-olds (N=20) on the socio-cognitive items was much higher than on the standard Raven's items, and there was little correlation between children's performance on the different kinds of items.