An Experiment Research On Of The Compound Mental Model Of Individuals' Solving Of Five-term Series Problem

Transitive reasoning is an essential ability in the development of children's thinking and cognition. Making researches on the mental model of transitive reasoning and its emergence and developmental tendency has a great help for systematically learning about the development of children's cognitive abilities, and for enriching and expanding theories about psychology. Even more, discussing the mental model of transitive reasoning contributes a lot to making a clear exploration of the core and mechanism of transitive reasoning. In the researches on the mechanism of transitive reasoning, according to traditional views they were carried out based on a single model. Since 1990s in 20 century, some researchers have begun to discuss the mechanism of transitive researches from the view of a compound mental model. Based on such a research thought, this research used S relatively refined transitive reasoning materials, investigated the transitive reasoning ability and the development of its mental mechanism on the students of grades 3 and 5 in elementary schools, 2 in junior high schools, 2 in senior high schools and 2 in colleges. The results are as follows:1. With the development of grade, the number of mental model that individuals can use to solve problems of transitive reasoning gradually increases. The increase of these mental models is ordinal. They follow such a sequence as spatial model, linguistic-spatial model, linguistic model, pivot comparative model and non-transitiveinference.2. For the transitive reasoning arriving at the mature level, what model to be adopted to solve the transitive reasoning problems is driven by the property of the materials; The transitive reasoning arriving at the mature level forms a compound mental model consisting of spatial model, linguistic-spatial model, linguistic model, pivot comparative model and non-transitive inference.3. When solving transitive reasoning problems, individuals follow a principle of economization, and the embodiment of such a principle is influenced by the property of those materials. According to the materials with different properties, individuals often tend to use those mental models that spend least mental energy on these materials.4. For the five-term series transitive reasoning problems, individuals possess such an ability of solving the problems with inevitable logic solutions prior to the non-transitive reasoning ability of solving the problems without inevitable logic solutions.