Capacity Limitations in Children' s Reasoning: A Dual- Task Approach

HALFORD, GRAEME S.; MAYBERY, MURRAY T.; and BAIN, JOHN D. Capacity Limitations in Children's Reasoning: A Dual-Task Approach. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1986, 57, 616-627. 2 dual-task paradigms, the memory load interference paradigm and the easy-to-hard paradigm, were used as converging operations to study capacity limitations in children's reasoning. The primary task was Nterm series reasoning and the secondary task was short-term retention and rehearsal of items. Pilot experiments showed that passive retention of a short-term memory load did not interfere with reasoning. Interference was observed from active rehearsal of large memory loads in Experiment 1, but the results also suggested that interference is probably a function of amount of processing in the secondary task and is not exclusive to mnemonic secondary tasks. The performance of 5-6-year-olds on transitive inference was significantly reduced by a concurrent information-processing task, suggesting a capacity limitation. In Experiment 2, the easy-to-hard paradigm was used and showed that transitive inference scores were predicted by performances on an easier version of the N-term series task performed concurrently with a short-term rehearsal task, when separate performances on the latter 2 were partialed out. It was concluded that transitive inference ability in children is capacity limited.