Inhibiting intuitive rules in a geometry comparison task: Do age level and math achievement matter?

Many people apply the "larger area-larger perimeter" rule to solve the perimeter comparison problems, even in situations where this intuitive rule is misleading. To investigate whether inhibitory control is needed in the perimeter comparison reasoning and whether the efficiency of inhibitory control varies with students' ages and achievements, we designed a negative priming paradigm and conducted two experiments. In Experiment 1, a negative priming effect was observed in both Chinese primary school students (n = 123) and college students (n = 42) when they were solving a perimeter comparison task. In Experiment 2 (N = 86), we found that the negative priming effect existed in both high-achieving and low-achieving primary school students, but the magnitude of this effect appeared to be smaller in high-achieving students. These results imply that success in solving geometry quantitative problems requires the ability to inhibit the larger area-larger perimeter intuition in some situations and also that high-achieving students are more capable of doing so.