Reconceptualizing the Transitive Inference Ability: A Framework for Existing and Future Research

Developmental Review

Volumn 21, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 375-422

  Wright, Barlow C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Children's reasoning; Developmental cognition; Logic; Memory; Transitive inference

Indexed keywords

EID: 0035730768     PISSN: 02732297     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1006/drev.2000.0525     Document Type: Article

References (106)

1. Adams, M. J. (1978). Logic competence and transitive inference in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 25, 477-489.
2. Boysen, S. T., Berntson, G. G., Shreyer, T. A., & Quigley, K. S. (1993). Processing of ordinality and transitivity by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 107, 1-8.
3. Boysson-Bardies, B. de., & O'Regan, K. (1973). What children know in spite of what they do. Nature, 246, 531-534.
4. Braine, M. D. S. (1959). The ontogeny of certain logical operations, Piaget's formulation examined by nonverbal methods. Psychological Monographs, General and Applied, 73(5), 1-43.
5. Brainerd, C. J., & Kingma, J. (1984). Do children have to remember to reason? A fuzzy-trace theory of transitivity development. Developmental Review, 4, 311-377.
6. Breslow, L. (1981). Reevaluation of the literature on the development of transitive inferences. Psychological Bulletin, 89(2), 325-351.
7. Bryant, P. E. (1973). What the young child has to learn about logic. In R. A. Hinde & J. Hinde (Eds.), Constraints on learning (pp. 417-425). London: Academic Press.
8. Bryant, P. E. (1974). Perception and understanding in young children: An experimental approach. New York: Basic Books.
9. Bryant, P. E., & Kopytynska, H. (1976). Spontaneous measurement by young children. Nature, 260, 773.
10. Bryant, P. E., & Trabasso, T. (1971). Transitive inference and memory in young children. Nature, 232, 456-458.
11. Chalmers, M., & McGonigle, B. O. (1984). Are children more logical than monkeys on the five term series problem. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 37, 355-377.
12. Chapman, M., & Lindenberger, U. (1988). Functions, operations and decalage in the development of transitivity. Developmental Psychology, 24, 542-551.
13. Chapman, M., & Lindenberger, U. (1992). How to detect reasoning remembering dependence (and how not to). Developmental Review, 12, 187-198.
14. Chater, N., & Heyes, C. (1994). Animal concepts: Content and discontent. Mind and Language, 9(3), 209-246.
15. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
16. Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representation. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
17. Davis, H. (1992). Transitive inference in rats (Rattus norvegicus). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 106, 342-349.
18. Donaldson, M. (1963). A study of children's thinking. London: Tavistock.
19. Donaldson, M. (1978). Children's minds. New York: Norton.
20. Donaldson, M. (1983). Children's reasoning. In M. Donaldson, R. Grieve, & C. Pratt (Eds.), Early childhood development and education (pp. 231-236). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
21. Elman, J. L. (1993). Learning and development in neural networks: The importance of starting small. Cognition, 48(1), 71-99.
22. Evans, J., Newstead, S. E., & Byrne, R. M. J. (1993). Human reasoning: The psychology of deduction. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
23. von Fersen, L., Wynne, C. D. L., Delius, J. D., & Staddon, J. E. R. (1991). Transitive inference formation in pigeons. Journal of Experimental Psychology, Animal Behavior Processes, 17, 334-341.
24. Frazier, L., Clifton, C., & Randall, J. (1983). Filling gaps: Decision principles and structure in sentence processing. Cognition, 13, 187-222.
25. Furth, H. G. (1977). The operative and figurative aspects of knowledge in Piaget's theory. In B. A. Geber (Ed.), Piaget and knowing, studies in genetic epistemology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
26. Gellatly, A. (1992). The misleading concept of cognitive competence. Theory and Psychology, 2(3), 363-390.
27. Gillan, D. J. (1981). Reasoning in the chimpanzee II. Transitive inference. Journal of Experimental Psychology, Animal Behavior Processes, 7, 150-164.
28. Green, G., Stromer, R., & Mackay, H. A. (1993). Relational learning in stimulus sequences. The Psychological Records, 43, 599-616.
29. Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics: Speech acts (Vol. 3, pp. 41-53). New York: Academic Press.
30. Griggs, R. A. (1984). Memory cuing and instructional effects on Wason's selection task. Current Psychological Research and Reviews, 3, 3-10.
31. Griggs, R. A., & Cox, J. R. (1983). The effects of problem content and negation on Wason's selection task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 35A, 519-533.
32. Halford, G. S., & Kelly, M. E. (1984). On the basis of early transitivity judgments. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 38, 42-63.
33. Halford, G. S., Smith, S. B., Dickson, J. C., Maybury, M. T., Kelly, M. E., Bain, J. D., & Stewart, J. E. M. (1995). Modeling the development of reasoning strategies: The roles of analogy, knowledge and capacity. In T. J. Simon & G. S. Halford (Eds.), Developing cognitive competence: New approaches to cognitive modeling (pp. 77-156). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
34. Harris, P. L., & Bassett, E. (1975). Transitive inferences by 4-year-old children? Developmental Psychology, 11, 875-876.
35. Hinton, G. E. (1989). Learning distributed representations of concepts. In R. G. M. Morris (Ed.), Parallel distributed processing: Implications for psychology and neurobiology. (pp. 46-61). Oxford, UK: Clarendon.
36. Holcomb, W. L., Stromer, R., & Mackay, H. A. (1997). Transitivity and emergent sequence performances in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 65, 96-124.
37. Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1964). The early growth of logic in the child (E. Lunzer & D. Papert, Trans). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
38. Ittyerah, M., & Samarapungavan, A. (1989). The performance of congenitally blind children in cognitive developmental tasks. Journal of Developmental Psychology, 7, 129-139.
39. Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
40. Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1986). Reasoning without logic. In T. Myers, K. Brown, & B. McGonigle (Eds.), Reasoning and discourse processes (pp. 13-49). London: Academic Press.
41. Johnson-Laird, P. N., & Byrne, R. M. J. (1991). Deduction. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
42. Kallio, K. D. (1982). Developmental change on a five-term transitive inference. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 33, 142-164.
43. Kallio, K. D. (1988). Developmental difference in the comprehension of simple and compound comparative relations. Child Development, 59, 397-410.
44. Kuczaj, S. A., & Donaldson, S. A. (1982). If the boy loves the girl and the girl loves the dog, does the boy love the dog - The overgeneralization of verbal transitive inference skills. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 11, 197-206.
45. Lazar, R. (1977). Extending sequence-class membership with matching to sample. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 27, 381-392.
46. Lutkus, A., & Trabasso, T. (1974). Transitive inferences by preoperational, retarded adolescents. American Journal of Mental Deficiency, 78, 599-606.
47. Mareschal, D., & Shultz, T. R. (1993). A connectionist model of the development of seriation. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 676-681). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
48. Markovits, H., & Dumas, C. (1992). Can pigeons really make transitive inferences? Journal of Experimental Psychology, Animal Behavior Processes, 18(3), 311-312.
49. Markovits, H., Dumas, C., & Malfait, N. (1995). Understanding transitivity of a spatial relationship, a developmental analysis. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 59, 124-141.
50. Maydak, M., Stromer, R., Mackay, H. A., & Stoddard, L. T. (1995). Stimulus classes in matching to sample and sequence production, the emergence of numeric relations. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 16(3), 179-204.
51. McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1986). Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Vol. 2: Psychological and biological models. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
52. McGonigle, B. O., & Chalmers, M. (1977). Are monkeys logical? Nature, 267, 694-696.
53. Moyer, R. S., & Bayer, R. H. (1976). Mental comparison and the symbolic distance effect. Cognitive Psychology, 8, 228-246.
54. Naigles, L. R. (1996). The use of multiple frames in verb learning via syntactic bootstrapping. Cognition, 58(2), 221-251.
55. Newstead, S., Keeble, S., & Manktelow, K. (1985). Children's performance on set inclusion and linear ordering relationships. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 23(2), 105-108.
56. Oakhill, J. (1981). Children's reading comprehension. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sussex.
57. Oakhill, J. (1984). Why children have difficulty reasoning with 3-term series problems. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2, 223-230.
58. Oakhill, J. (1993). Children's difficulties in reading comprehension. Educational Psychology Review, 5(3), 223-237.
59. Oaksford, M., & Chater, N. (in press). Commonsense reasoning, logic and human rationality. In R. Elio (Ed.), Commonsense reasoning and rationality. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press.
60. Pears, R., & Bryant, P. E. (unpublished). Transitive inference about space. Paper presented at a Developmental seminar, Department of Psychology, University of Oxford, 15 October 1990.
61. Pears, R., & Bryant, P. E. (1990). Transitive inferences by young children about spatial position. British Journal of Psychology, 81, 497-510.
62. Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the representational mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
63. Perner, J., & Aebi, J. (1985). Feedback-dependent encoding of length series. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 3, 133-141.
64. Perner, J., & Mansbridge, D. G. (1983). Developmental differences in encoding length series. Child Development, 54, 710-719.
65. Ferner, J., Steiner, G., & Staehelin, C. (1981). Mental representation of length and weight series and transitive inferences in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 31, 177-192.
66. Piaget, J. (1921). Une forme verbale de la comparison chez l'enfant. Archives de Psychologie, 18, 141-172.
67. Piaget, J. (1928). Judgement and reasoning in the child. London: Routledge Chapman & Hall.
68. Piaget, J. (1950). The psychology of intelligence. London: Routledge & Kegal Paul.
69. Piaget, J. (1970). Piaget's theory. In P. H. Mussen (Ed.), Carmichael's manual of child psychology (pp. 703-732). New York: Wiley.
70. Piaget, J., Grize, J. B., Szeminska, A., & Vinh Bang. (1977). Epistemology and psychology of functions. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel.
71. Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1967). The child's conception of space (F. J. Langdon & J. L. Lunzer, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
72. Piaget, J., Inhelder, B., & Szeminska, A. (1960). The child's conception of geometry (E. Lunzer, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
73. Plunkett, K., & Marchman, V. (1993). From rote learning to system building: Acquiring verb morphology in children and connectionist nets. Cognition, 48, 21-69.
74. Rabinowitz, S. M., Grant, M. J., Howe, M. L., & Walsh, C. (1994). Reasoning in middle childhood: A dynamic model of performance on transitivity tasks. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 58, 252-288.
75. Rabinowitz, F. M., & Howe, M. L. (1994). Development of the middle concept. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 57, 418-448.
76. Riley, C. A. (1976). The representation of comparative relations and the transitive inference task. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 22, 1-22.
77. Riley, C. A., & Trabasso, T. (1974). Comparatives, logical structures and encoding in a transitive inference task. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 17, 187-203.
78. Roberts, W. A., & Phelps, M. T. (1994). Transitive inference in rats - A test of the spatial coding hypothesis. American Psychological Society, 5(6), 368-374.
79. Russell, J., McCormack, T., Robinson, J., & Lillis, G. (1996). Logical (versus associative) performance on transitive reasoning tasks by children - Implications for the status of animals' performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 49B(3), 231-244.
80. Siegel, L. (1972). Development of the concept of seriation. Developmental Psychology, 6, 135-137.
81. Smedslund, J. (1963). Development of concrete transitivity of length in children. Child Development, 34, 389-405.
82. Sternberg, R. J. (1980). The development of linear syllogistic reasoning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 29, 340-356.
83. Stetson, P. C. (unpublished). Verbal transitivity in children. Doctoral dissertation, University of Delaware, Dissertation Abstracts International, 35, 2064A-2065A (University Microfilms No 74-22, 218).
84. Stevens, S. S. (1951). Mathematics, measurement, and psychophysics. In S. S. Stevens (Ed.), Handbook of experimental psychology (pp. 1-49). New York: Wiley.
85. Stromer, R., Mackay, H. A., Cohen, M., & Stoddard, L. T. (1993). Sequence learning in individuals with behavioural limitations. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 37, 243-261.
86. Thayer, E. S., & Collyer, C. E. (1978). The developmental of transitive inference. A review of recent approaches. Psychological Bulletin, 85, 1327-1343.
87. Trabasso, T. (1975). Representation, memory and reasoning: How do we make transitive inferences? In A. D. Pick (Ed.), Minnesota symposia on child psychology (Vol. 9, pp. 135-172). Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
88. Trabasso, T. (1977). The role of memory as a system in making transitive inferences. In R. V. Kail & J. W. Hagan (Eds.), Perspectives on the development of memory and cognition (pp. 333-366). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
89. Trabasso, T., & Riley, C. A. (1975). The construction and use of representations involving linear order. In R. L. Solso (Ed.), Information processing and cognition, the Loyola Symposium (pp. 381-410). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
90. Trabasso, T., Riley, C. A., & Wilson, E. G. (1975). The representation of linear order and spatial strategies in reasoning. In R. Falmagne (Ed.), Reasoning, representation and process (pp. 201-229). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
91. Trabasso, T., & Suh, S. (1993). Understanding text: Achieving explanatory coherence through on-line inferences and mental operations in working memory. Discourse Processes, 16(12), 3-34.
92. Verweij, A. C., Sijtsma, K., & Koops, W. (1996). A mokken scale for transitive reasoning suited for longitudinal research. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 19(1), 219-238.
93. Wason, P. C., & Johnson-Laird, P. M. (1972). Psychology of reasoning. London: Batsford.
94. Wright, B. C. (1996). What underlies transitive inference performance. Paper given at the British Psychological Society Annual General Conference, Developmental Section, September 1996.
95. Wright, B. C. (1998). And if the developmental data doesn't quite fit. . . . Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 21, 847-848.
96. Wright, B. C. (submitted-a). Recognizing the "transitive error" points to a new component in transitive reasoning.
97. Wright, B. C. (submitted-b). Cues to differential absolute size artificially boost transitive performance. (Accepted pending revision).
98. Wright, B. C. (submitted-c). Memory, inference and the operation of the transitive switch in transitive reasoning.
99. Wright, B. C. (in preparation-a). Temporal presentation effects in transitive reasoning.
100. Wright, B. C. (in preparation-b). Three processes in adults' solution of transitive tasks.
101. Wynne, C. D. L. (1995). Reinforcement accounts for transitive inference performance. Animal Learning and Behavior, 23, 207-217.
102. Wynne, C. D. L. (1997). Pigeon transitive inference: Tests of simple accounts of a complex performance. Behavioural Processes, 39, 95-112.
103. Wynne, C. D. L. (1998). A minimal model of transitive inference. In C. D. L. Wynne & J. E. R. Staddon (Eds.), Models for action. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
104. Youniss, J., & Furth, H. (1973). Reasoning and Piaget. Nature, 244, 314-315.
105. Youniss, J., & Murray, J. (1970). Transitive inference with nontransitive solutions controlled. Developmental Psychology, 2, 169-175.
106. Zurif, E. B. (1990). Language and the brain. In D. N. Osherson & H. Lasnik (Eds.), An invitation to cognitive science: Language (Vol. 1, pp. 177-198). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.