Individual and Developmental Differences in the Making of Inferences by Preschool Children

Individual and Developmental Differences in the Making of Inferences by Preschool Children

Individual and developmental differences in inferences were examined in two small-scale studies with preschool children. The major question of interest was "is there a 'g' for inferential thinking?". Children 3 to 5 years of age, 62 in the first study and 25 in the second, completed a variety of tasks involving inferences. Five tasks were used in the first study: picture identification, object functions, analogies, causal inferences, and riddles. In the second study, the picture identification and object function tasks were replaced with oddities and series tasks. In Study 1 significant linear trends for age were obtained for each task. There were moderate to strong correlations among tasks and a factor analysis revealed only one factor accounting for 51% of the variance in task performance. In Study 2, there were significant age trends for story inferences and riddles again, but not for analogies. The patters of correlations in Study 2 were similar to those in Study 1. However, performance on the series task was only significantly related to causal inferences and performance on the oddities task was only related to performance on riddles. These data show that performances on different types of inference tasks are related to each other to a considerable degree and are sensitive to age differences even within a relatively short span during the preschool years. There is a need to explore processes underlying different types of inference-making to determine possible reasons for developmental changes.