Emergence of higher-order transitivity across development: The importance of local task difficulty

This study investigates the effect of local task difficulty on children´s tendency to combine pieces of information into larger wholes. The particular hypothesis is that the emergence of higher-order Gestalts is guided neither by innate capabilities nor by laborious thought processes. Instead, it is - at least partly - tied to the difficult of the local task, adaptively allowing the mind to reduce cognitive demand. The higher-order Gestalt used here was the transitive congruence among three feature relations. And the local task was to remember two of the feature relations from brief exposures, after having learned the third relation to criterion. The two to-be-learned relations violated transitivity with the third relation, such that a bias toward higher-order transitivity could be determined on the basis of children´s performance mistakes. Importantly, the two to-be-learned relations either matched in direction (posing a low cognitive demand), or they had opposite directions (posting higher cognitive demand). Results show that 5- to 9-year-olds were affected by higher-order transitivity only in the locally difficult task, not when the local task was easy.