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Updated: Jul 11, 2026

Practical Methodology of Cognitive Tasks Within a Navigational Assessment
Published on: June 1, 2015
How smart do you need to be to get it wrong? The role of cognitive capacity in the development of heuristic-based
Kinga Morsanyi1, Simon J Handley
1School of Psychology, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, Devon PL4 8AA, UK. kinga.morsanyi@plymouth.ac.uk
Abstract:
We examined the relationship between cognitive capacity and heuristic responding on four types of reasoning and decision-making tasks. A total of 84 children, between 5 years 2 months and 11 years 7 months of age, participated in the study. There was a marked increase in heuristic responding with age that was related to increases in cognitive capacity. These findings are inconsistent with the predominant dual-process accounts of reasoning and decision making as applied to development. We offer an alternative explanation of the findings, considering them in the context of recent claims concerning the role of working memory in contextualized reasoning.
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