Developmental Differences in Young Children’s Solutions of Logical vs. Empirical Problems

We examined the development of the ability to differentiate logically determinate from logically indeterminate problems. The results indicated that a) young children tend to reduce the number of empirical possibilities via “cutting” the second half of less informative propositions, b) these errors do not stem from encoding or recall errors, c) from elementary to middle school, children tend to increase their understanding of logical form, and d) this increase corresponds to a decrease in the rate of cuts.