[The development of children's inference abilities in their relation to eye-movements]

Eighty-eight children (kindergartners, second- and sixth-graders) were successively given three (Memory, Inference and Comparison) tasks, and their eye-movements were recorded. In Inference task, subjects were asked to draw an affirmative, partially negative, and negative inference from two lines of figure series which were divided into an upper-set (yellow-cross and green-triangle) and a lower-set (green-triangle and green-cross). It was found that, whereas second-graders began to show the different way of scanning from kindergartners during Inference task, scanning by peripheral vision appeared only for sixth-graders, and a difference has been shown between pattern of eye-movements to correct and wrong answers in those two elder groups, but no such difference was obtained in kindergartners.