Abstract

We examine schoolchildren’s reasoning with spatial relations, such as ‘is to the left of’. Our aims are to obtain a more precise account of the effect of working memory on reasoning, a more detailed understanding of the internal representation of mental models and a developmental perspective. We discuss two experiments in which 348 children, between eight and twelve years old, needed to verify conclusions for 24 reasoning problems describing the spatial relations between pieces of clothing. In both experiments, children in the experimental condition were allowed to take notes by means of paper and pencil. We find that the participants spontaneously draw iconic representations of the items’ spatial ordering, have a strong preference for only considering one possible state of affairs even when more are relevant, and that an explanation in terms of working memory capacity alone cannot fully explain the data.

摘要

我们用空间关系检查学童的推理，例如“在左边”。我们的目标是更准确地说明工作记忆对推理的影响，更详细地了解心智模型的内部表征和发展视角。我们讨论了两个实验，其中 348 名 8 到 12 岁的儿童需要验证 24 个描述衣服之间空间关系的推理问题的结论。在这两个实验中，实验条件下的儿童​​都被允许用纸和铅笔做笔记。我们发现参与者自发地绘制项目空间顺序的标志性表示，即使在更多相关的情况下，也强烈偏好只考虑一种可能的事态，