The influence of relational complexity and strategy selection on children's reasoning in the Latin Square Task

L'influence de la complexité relationnelle et des stratégies sur le raisonnement de l'enfant dans la tâche du Carré Latin

Patrick Perret , Christine Bailleux (1) , Bruno Dauvier (1)

1 PsyCLÉ - Centre de Recherche en Psychologie de la Connaissance, du Langage et de l'Émotion

The present study focused on children's deductive reasoning when performing the Latin Square Task, an experimental task designed to explore the influence of relational complexity. Building on Birney, Halford, and Andrew's (2006) research, we created a version of the task that minimized nonrelational factors and introduced new categories of items. The results of two experiments conducted with school-aged children yielded an apparent dilution of complexity effects and suggest that specific inferential strategies can reduce the relational complexity that children need to process. A theoretical account is proposed emphasizing the influence of adaptive selection of strategies that mediate processing capacity constraints in reasoning development.

Mots clés: Reasoning; Relational complexity theory; Cognitive development; Latin Square Task; Strategy selection

Domaines: Psychologie

Patrick Perret, Christine Bailleux, Bruno Dauvier. The influence of relational complexity and strategy selection on children's reasoning in the Latin Square Task. Cognitive Development, 2011, 26 (2), pp.127 - 141. ⟨10.1016/j.cogdev.2010.12.003⟩. ⟨hal-01772235⟩