Understanding conditional rules in childhood and adolescence: A mental models approach

Several studies have recently dealt with the development of the understandi ng of the conditional connective if. These studies have frequently failed t o show a clear developmental trend in early adolescence. It has been sugges ted that this phenomenon is due to the difficulty of the task, which appear s to require metalogical knowledge. The purpose of the present experiments was twofold: (1) to provide a picture of the developmental trend in adolesc ence by using simplified tasks, and (2) to determine the effect of various contexts in which the if connective appears. Two tasks were designed to ass ess (a) the recognition of impermissible instances, and (b) the recognition of permissible instances. For both tasks, there was a clear developmental trend between the third and ninth grades, exhibiting a progression from a c onjunctive to a conditional interpretation of if, with a biconditional inte rpretation as an intermediate level. It is shown that Johnson-Laird's menta l models theory accounts for this developmental trend. The context had a st rong effect on performance. In each task, the familiar causal context led t o lower performance.