Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Conditionals are statements of the form ”If P, Then Q”. Reasoning about conditionals is a core component of humancognition. However, studies of how adults and children interpret and use conditionals have highlighted discrepancies be-tween human reasoning and logic inference rules. Recently, Douven and Verbrugge (2010) have found that a classificationof conditionals based on the type of inferential connection between the antecedent and the consequent (e.g., deductive,inductive and abductive conditionals) allowed for a finer analysis of adult conditional reasoning. Do these findings ex-tend to child conditional reasoning? We report a study (N=200, ages 4 to 11) that examines how performance in modusponens and modus tollens tasks depends on the type of conditional embedded in the argument. These results will shedlight on how the development of conditional reasoning in children is sensitive to the nature of the inferential relationshipof conditionals.