Rule-based Reasoning From 3 To 4 Years Old Children

Research about rule-based reasoning in children had become focus in cognition resently. Many researchers designed all kinds of tasks to study the ability of rule-based reasoning in children and accumulated massive research results in this field. Especially, the dimentional change card sort which the Zelazo designed was more representative. They investigated the inf lunence factor of rule-based reasoning and the genetic age of rule-based reasoning about the dimensional change card sort . But we think there were some deficiencies. So we adopted the dimensional change card sort to investigate the influence factor of rule-based reasoning from 3 to 4 years old children, and the genetic age of rule-based reasoning. Three experiments were conducted. The results were follows:(1) The capacity of working memory wasn' t a genetic and developmental factor about two dimensional rule-based reasoning of children.(2) 3 year 4 month old children began to use two dimensional rules, and most left one month to be 4 years old children and older children had ability of two dimentional rule-based reasoning.(3) 3 year 7 month old children began to use the higher order rules, and most 4 year 1 month old children had ability of the higher order rules reasoning.