• Children are more likely to reason in sophisticated ways when they work with familiar tasks and topics. Earlier I mentioned that children and adolescents display more advanced reasoning skills when they work with subject matter they know well. We find an example in a study by Pulos and Linn (1981). In this study, 13-year-olds were shown the picture presented in Figure 12.6 and told, “These four children go fishing every week, and one child, Herb, always catches the most fish. The other children wonder why” If you look at the picture, it’s obvious that Herb differs from the other children in several ways, including the kind of bait he uses; the length of his fishing rod, and his location by the pond. Students who were avid fishermen more effectively separated and controlled variables for this situation than they did for the pendulum problem described earlier, whereas the reverse was true for nonfishermen.