Effect Of Processing Speed And Working Memory Span On Figural Reasoning Ability In Adolescents

Reasoning, mainly related to the ability of one individual understanding of written materials and figural transformation and verbal concepts, comparison, interpretation, composition, and judgement.The development of children's reasoning ability is a key factor in the development of thinking, discussing ability of the children in the development of psychological mechanisms can help to reveal the characteristics and nature of the children's intellectual development. Compared with other forms of reasoning, intuitive figural reasoning could avoid the knowledge and experience, language ability and other factors, it can more objectively reflect the development of of individual's thinking. In addition, a variety of cognitive abilities in children and adolescents are growing, figural reasoning just be able to adapt to different age children. In recent years, researches on the figural reasoning, especially about figural reasoning to the development of reasoning problems have become a hot area of research.In this study, the cases were 15years old to 18 years old, the method were multivariate analysis of variance, regression analysis, structural equation modeling and other methods.We had investived the developing of characteristics of the children's figural reasoning ability, and influencing of age, speed of information processing and working memory span to figure reasoning ability. Specifically, it included the following conclusions:1. With age, the children's figural reasoning wave changed wavily, not straighting up, not a smooth development, but from 15 to 16 years there was a downward trend, and then rapidly.The sex difference of abstract figural reasoning was not significant, while the sex differences of category of figural reasoning extremely was significant. Boys score was higher than girls in reasoning, and the smallest differences in the age of 16, while the biggest difference between the age of 18. Different level of difficulty of reasoning tasks, the correct rate with the difficulty increases.2. For complex figural reasoning tasks, reaction time is not suitable for evaluating the level of the target reasoning ability, the correct response rate could more truly reflects the development of the childrens'figural reasoning ability.3. The speed of information processing tasks were showing significant age differences, but the direction was different.The boys in choice reaction tasks played significantly faster than the girls on the other hand in the shape matching played not much difference.4. There was no significant difference in verbal working memory span from 15 to 18 years old children in age and gender,but there was a very significant differences in visual-spatial working memory span,17 year-old is a turning point in the.The boys' visual-spatial working memory span was better than the girl's.5. The factors of infulenceing figural reasoning ability, the working memory is the greatest,age is the second, and the minimum is processing speed. Age to processing speed, processing speed to working memory have a direct effect. Age through the "age to figural reasoning ability" and "Age to processing speed to working memory to figural reasoning," the two paths influenced the figural reasoning.