There is little consensus about the nature of logical reasoning and, equally important, about how it develops. To address this, we looked at the early origins of deductive reasoning in preschool children. We examined the contribution of two factors to the reasoning ability of very young children: inhibitory capacity and the capacity to generate alternative […]

One of the major debates concerning the nature of inferential reasoning is between counterexample-based strategies such as mental model theory and statistical strategies underlying probabilistic models. The dual-strategy model, proposed by Verschueren, Schaeken, & d’Ydewalle (2005a, 2005b), which suggests that people might have access to both kinds of strategy has been supported by several recent […]

Studies examining children’s basic understanding of conditionals have led to very different conclusions. On the one hand, conditional inference tasks suggest that young children are able to interpret familiar conditionals in a complex manner. In contrast, truth-table tasks suggest that before adolescence, children have limited (conjunctive) representations of conditionals. We hypothesized that the latter results […]

Both empirical data and theoretical approaches suggest that argumentation is an important component of development of reasoning skills. We argue that if argumentation does have a primary role, then children should be able to distinguish more from less logical justifications even when they are incapable of determining the correct conclusion by themselves. We asked 8- […]

One of the major debates concerning the nature of inferential reasoning is between counterexample-based strategies such as mental model theory and the statistical strategies underlying probabilistic models. The dual-strategy model proposed by Verschueren, Schaeken, and d’Ydewalle (2005a, 2005b) suggests that people might have access to both kinds of strategies. One of the postulates of this […]