Can infants make transitive inferences?
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Updated: May 5, 2026

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
Yi Mou1, Jordan M Province1, Yuyan Luo1
1Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA.
Abstract:
Researchers have long been interested in the emergence of transitive reasoning abilities (e.g., if A>B and B>C, then A>C). Preschool-aged children are found to make transitive inferences. Additionally, nonhuman animals demonstrate parallel abilities, pointing to evolutionary roots of transitive reasoning. The present research examines whether 16-month-old infants can make transitive inferences about other people's preferences. If an agent prefers object-A over B (A>B) and B over C (B>C), infants seem to reason that she also prefers A over C (A>C) (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 provides indirect evidence that a one-directional linear ordering of the three items (A>B>C) may have helped infants to succeed in the task. These and control results present the first piece of evidence that precursors of transitive reasoning cognitive abilities exist in infancy.
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