The development of inductive reasoning under consideration of the effect due to test speededness

Abstract

Measures of inductive reasoning are frequently used as proxy of a child’s cognitive develop-ment. Unfortunately, a reasoning scale might be affected by speededness introduced by li-mited testing time. As a result, the scale might be heterogeneous and its correlation with age is hard to interpret. Here we investigated the development of inductive reasoning when a possible bias by the effect of speededness is controlled for. In 250 children, ranging in age from 8;0 to 12;8 years, inductive reasoning assessed with the Culture Fair Test 20-R (CFT 20-R) increased with age. The effect of speededness was identified in all four CFT 20-R sub-test and was also related to age indicating increasing processing speed with higher age. After controlling for the effect of speededness, the relation between age and inductive rea-soning was still observed but substantially decreased. Consequences of these results for the description of inductive reasoning data obtained with time-limited tests and for develop-mental studies on the interplay between age, inductive reasoning and speed of information processing are discussed.scussed