ABSTRACT
Research on deductive reasoning in adolescents and adults has shown that errors in deductive logic are not necessarily due to a lack of logical ability but can stem from an executive failure to inhibit biases. Few studies have examined this dissociation in children. Here, we used a negative priming paradigm with 64 children (8-10 years old) to test the role of cognitive inhibition in syllogisms with belief-bias effects. On trials where negative priming was predicted, results were as follows: For the first syllogism (A), the strategy 'unbelievable-equals-invalid' had to be inhibited. The logic of the syllogism led to affirming a conclusion inconsistent with one's knowledge of the world, such as 'All elephants are light.' For the second syllogism (B), one's real-world knowledge and the syllogism's logic were congruent but the latter required affirming exactly what had been inhibited for A (i.e. that elephants are heavy). A negative priming effect on the A-B sequence was reflected in a significant drop in reasoning performance on B. This supports the idea that during cognitive development, inhibitory control is required for success on syllogisms where beliefs and logic interfere.
Subject(s)
Cognition , Logic , Attitude , Child , Child Development , Female , Humans , Male , PerceptionABSTRACT
'Theory of mind' development is now an important research field in deaf studies. Past research with the classic false belief task has consistently reported a delay in theory of mind development in deaf children born of hearing parents, while performance of second-generation deaf children is more problematic with some contradictory results. The present paper is aimed at testing the metacognitive abilities of deaf children on two tasks: the appearance-reality paradigm designed by Flavell, Flavell and Green (1983) and the classic false belief inference task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Hogrefe, Wimmer & Perner, 1986). Twenty-eight second-generation deaf children, 60 deaf children of hearing parents and 36 hearing children, aged 5 to 7, were tested and compared on three appearance-reality and three false belief items. Results show that early exposure to language, be it signed or oral, facilitates performance on the two theory of mind tasks. In addition, native signers equal hearing children in the appearance-reality task while surpassing them on the false belief one. The differences of performance patterns in the two tasks are discussed in terms of linguistic and metarepresentational development.
