Markovits H, Dumas C, Malfait N (1995)
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 59:124-141.

Pears and Bryant (1990) found that children as young as 4 years old could make correct transitive inferences on a task examining their understanding of the relation "higher than," if the premises were presented in the form of sets of two block towers. This study extended their investigation by looking at children's transitive inferences in situations in which the representation of the premises provided contradictory information depending on relative or ordinal position of the A and B elements of the three part series, A > B > C was used. The results showed that performance on problems similar to those used by Pears and Bryant was very high for 6- and 8-year olds. However, the 6-year-olds had great difficulty with the more complex problems, whereas the 8-year-olds did significantly better. These results are interpreted as indicating the presence of a developmental sequence of algorithms that enable children to resolve progressively more complex transitive inference problems.