Transitive Relational Mappings in Three‐ and Four‐Year‐Olds: The Analogy of Goldilocks and the Three Bears

3 experiments examined the ability of a group of 3- and 4-year-old children to make transitive relational mappings based on size. In the first experiment, the children were asked to map relative size from 1 array of objects to another when the absolute sizes of the stimuli were either identical or different, and when the spatial positions of the relationally similar stimuli in each array were also either identical or different. In the second experiment, the concrete representation of size relations between the arrays was varied by asking the children to map relative size to relative proportion. In this cross-representational mapping task, the spatial position of the relationally similar stimuli was again either identical or different. In Experiment 3, the children were asked to map relative size to a variety of different perceptual dimensions including temperature, pitch, and loudness. This more abstract mapping task required the use of mentally represented transitive relations. Each experiment presented the mapping task using the analogy of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The results are discussed in terms of theories of structure mapping and the development of logical reasoning.

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