Visual Logical Reasoning

Logical reasoning skills are the thought processes which allow us to arrive at successful conclusions in a rational and ordered manner. It involves making comparisons, identifying differences, recognizing patterns and relationships, making estimations, visualising and performing abstract thought processes.  Visual logical reasoning is crucial to the development of mathematical thinking skills. These skills allow children to understand concepts such as length, mass, volume, area and speed.

Objects are not always what they appear to our senses due to perceptual illusions. For example consider two containers a taller thinner one and a shorter wider one. When asked which contains more young children will invariably point to the taller one; they fail to understand that width also contributes to volume. Children who analyse information in this manner are said to be in the pre-operational stage of cognitive development, which occurs between the ages of 2 and 6. During the pre-operational period the child’s thinking is not “mental” in the sense that we understand mature intellectual activity. Instead it takes places almost exclusively in the form of physical movement and activity, which is best understood as “body and sense thinking”. In the early years of school many children are still largely operating on sensory-motor actions and do not have the mental maturity to visualise tasks in their mind. In order to understand mathematical operations they need concrete reinforcement, ie. to touch or see an object to understand it. Children at this age are also impulsive and many of their reasoning strategies involve guessing. The school curriculum often alienates these children because it forces them to work with abstract concepts for which they are not mentally prepared.

Between the ages of 5 and 7 the child’s reasoning becomes more logical and less fooled by perceptual clues. Children can now reason that items may look different, but have not changed in form when viewed from a different perspective, which is known as visual form constancy. Eg. The length of a piece of string remains constant whether it be stretched or made into a curved line. Children who analyse information in this manner are said to be in the concrete-operational stage of cognitive development, which occurs between the ages of 6 and 12. Concrete operations are the mental manipulations (processes) such as addition, subtraction, reversibility etc that a child uses to analyse their environment. A child who processes at the concrete level is able to perform sequential thought processes and is able to visualize tasks without the need for sensory-motor actions. ie. The child can mentally analyse and manipulate objects without having to physically touch them. They learn to visualize how items look from above, from underneath, from the other side by creating a mental picture of these transpositions and rotations in their mind. They learn relationships between objects in space, including clues to location and relative size. 

Consider the following problem.

The answer to the above problem is likely to be somehwere near point 'g' or 'h'. When a five year old was asked this question he pointed to 'b'. When asked why he suggested because the car was going faster it would get there sooner.

Problem 2: In the diagram below which of the four images is not the same as the test object ?

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