The ability to solve problems such as "Pete is older than Jill, and Jill is older than Pat, who is older?, demonstrates competence in transitivity. In psychology the term transitivity inference is used to describe the competence that an individual acquires, commonly around the ages of 7 to 12 years old. The individual has a higher capacity of reasoning and is able to replace words, like better than, older than, shorter than, with a transitive relation, as shown in the case of the question.
