Decision Making and Logical Deductions in Early Childhood When Dealing with the Quantifier “For All”

Le résumé fourni par la source

In natural language, there is a necessity for logical connectives, such as “and” and “or”, and in quantifiers, such as “all” and “exists/there is/are”. In this chapter, we investigate the decision-making and logical reasoning processes among young children, specifically when dealing with logical deduction based on the quantifier “all”. Two hundred and seventy eight kindergarten and first- and second-grade pupils participated in the study, (age range 4–8 years). In this chapter, we report on a problem worded as follows: “All of Roni’s red shirts are in the closet. Is Roni wearing a red shirt or a green shirt now?” The findings of this study show that about fifty percent of the children arrived at the correct decision about Roni’s shirt colour, with older children giving a higher percentage of correct answers: a reasonable expectation given that children are developing their cognitive abilities. In addition, the findings of this study do suggest that there is a very strong significant correlation between decision making and the rationale given by children, and this is influenced by three predominant factors: environmental, preferences, and intuition. The principle conclusion from this study is that there are parameters that affect the logical reasoning in early childhood: environment, intuition, and preferences. In addition, young children may use abductive reasoning when required to deal with quantifier-based problems, but this only occurs in the case of an incorrect decision.

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