Logical competence and transitive inference in young children

Abstract

Five-year-old children were trained on the length relationships between the adjacent members of a five-term series of sticks. They were then tested on their abilities (1) to judge the length relationships between nonadjacent pairs of the series, and (2) to incorporate an unseen novel stick into the series through inference. Children who were trained with sticks of markedly different lengths succeeded on the first test but not the second; they apparently relied on memory for the absolute lengths of the sticks. Children in the other groups succeeded on both tests. The critical factor in inducing the use of seriation and transitivity seemed to be the elimination of alternative solutions.