Heuristic and analytic processing: Age trends and associations with cognitive ability and cognitive styles

doi:10.1016/S0022-0965(02)00121-2

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Volume 83, Issue 1, September 2002, Pages 26-52

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-0965(02)00121-2 Get rights and content

Abstract

Developmental and individual differences in the tendency to favor analytic responses over heuristic responses were examined in children of two different ages (10- and 11-year-olds versus 13-year-olds), and of widely varying cognitive ability. Three tasks were examined that all required analytic processing to override heuristic processing: inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning under conditions of belief bias, and probabilistic reasoning. Significant increases in analytic responding with development were observed on the first two tasks. Cognitive ability was associated with analytic responding on all three tasks. Cognitive style measures such as actively open-minded thinking and need for cognition explained variance in analytic responding on the tasks after variance shared with cognitive ability had been controlled. The implications for dual-process theories of cognition and cognitive development are discussed.

Section snippets

Participants

The participants were 108 students (48 females and 60 males) in grades 5, 6, and 8, placed in general and gifted classes in one urban school. The school serves primarily a lower-middle to middle class population base. The school also contains a self-contained gifted program for grades 5–8. Four participants from the original sample of 112 were eliminated, two because they were recent immigrants who had been doing schoolwork in English for less than two years and two who had pro-rated IQ scores

Inductive reasoning task

The inductive reasoning problems were taken from Fong, Krantz, and Nisbett (1986) (see also Jepson et al., 1983) and adapted for use by children. Students read 15 reasoning problems about everyday matters. Seven of the problems involved the accurate use of base-rate information only. Responses for all four groups were close to ceiling on these problems (73.1% of the sample got all seven correct) and thus they were not analyzed further. The eight problems where base-rate information conflicted

Results

Table 2 displays the means for each of the critical reasoning tasks in the study across the two age groups and the two programs. Recall that higher scores on each of the variables (including the analytic processing composite) indicate greater tendencies toward analytic processing. A 2 (grade: 5/6 versus 8) × 2 (program: general versus gifted) analysis of variance conducted on the inductive reasoning task scores indicated that the effects of grade, F(1,104)=9.58, p<.01, and program, F

Discussion

The results of this investigation regarding cognitive ability indicated that there were moderate to strong tendencies for analytic processing to increase with increases in cognitive ability on each of the tasks. The potency of cognitive ability as a predictor was not markedly reduced by including any other variable in the study as a covariate. Like cognitive ability, age was positively related to analytic processing tendencies, but not as strongly. Age displayed a significant .26 correlation

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the staff and students at W.H. Morden Public School. This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Keith E. Stanovich. Requests for reprints should be sent to Keith E. Stanovich, Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6.

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Heuristic and analytic processing: Age trends and associations with cognitive ability and cognitive styles

Abstract

Section snippets

Participants

Inductive reasoning task

Results

Discussion

Acknowledgements

Learning and Individual Differences

Brain and Cognition

Cognition

Developmental Review

Cognitive Psychology

Personality and Individual Differences

Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Learning and Individual Differences

The adaptive character of thought

The psychology of waste

Journal of Behavioral Decision Making

Development of syllogistic reasoning

American Journal of Psychology

Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions: Constructing a unifying theory of ADHD

Psychological Bulletin

Outcome bias in decision evaluation

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Does the study of autism justify minimalist innate modularity

Learning and Individual Differences

Working memory and the developmental analysis of probability judgment

Psychological Review

Fuzzy-trace theory: Dual processes in memory, reasoning, and cognitive neuroscience

Reasoning about certainty and uncertainty in concrete, causal, and propositional contexts

Developmental Psychology

Dispositional differences in cognitive motivation: The life and times of individuals varying in need for cognition

Psychological Bulletin

Intellectual development: Birth to adulthood

The mind’s staircase: Exploring the conceptual underpinnings of children’s thought and knowledge

Willingness to reason and the identification of the self

The differential processing price in gains and losses: The effects of frame and need for cognition

Journal of Behavioral Decision Making

The representativeness heuristic and the conjunction fallacy effect in children’s decision making

Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

Interference and inhibition in cognition and behavior: Unifying themes for educational psychology

Educational Psychology Review

Conflict between intuitive and rational processing: When people behave against their better judgment

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

The intentional stance

Reconceptualizing change in the cognitive construction of knowledge

Educational Psychologist

Working memory, short-term memory, and general fluid intelligence: a latent-variable approach

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious

American Psychologist

Constructive thinking: A broad coping variable with specific components

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Manual for the scale of intellectual development

The Scale of Intellectual Development: Measuring Perry’s scheme

Journal of College Student Personnel

Heuristic and analytic processes in reasoning

British Journal of Psychology

Bias in human reasoning: Causes and consequences

Deciding before you think: Relevance and reasoning in the selection task

British Journal of Psychology

Rationality and reasoning

Modularity of mind

A developmental perspective on individual differences in inhibition

Learning and Individual Differences

The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence

The use of judgment heuristics to make social and object decisions: A developmental perspective

Child Development

The development of reasoning with causal conditionals

Developmental Psychology