An Experiment Research On The Development Of 9-11-year-old Children's Transitive Inference In Daily Situation

Transitive inference is an important aspect in cognitive development and is also important basis in the development of children's thought. From the early of the 19th century, the international psychologists had conducted a great deal of experiments on this topic, and known a lot of about human's transitivity. According to the great deal of former research on transitivity, the development of research on this topic can be divided into five periods. Among the enormous former researches, there were the main properities of transitivity, the intial sprouting age of children's transitivity, the mental models of transitive inference process, the processing strategies and so on. Most of the former research on children's transitive inference is about transitive inference in the physical field, such as length, height, size.However, the children's cognitive development is not only about the physical field but also about the social field. Morever children's cognitive development and social development cann't be seperated and they depend on each other for existance.In this study, we conducted two experiments, using 240 children aged 9 to 11 to compare children's transitive inference in the daily situation with that in the physical field. And we also compared true transitive inference with false transitive inference in daily situation. Thus, the following conclusions have been drawn:l.At the age range from 9 to 11,the children's ability of transitive inference in the daily situation develops slower than that in physical field. At the age of 11, the children'sability of transitive inference in the daily situation doesn't develop well yet.2.The children adopt more logic strategies in the daily situation than that in the physical field. Analysis by strategies types of transitive inference between logic and non-logic didn't show any significant effects at these ages.3.When making the false transitive reasoning similar to the true transitive reasoning in the daily situation, the children can pick up regularities in their social world and translate these into simple inferential strategies that allow them to predict the outcome of fairly complex social interactions.