Cognitive Development: Infancy Through Adolescence: Infancy Through Adolescence by Kathleen M. Galotti

Author:Kathleen M. Galotti
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition, Psychology, General
ISBN: 9781483376653
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2010-07-08T04:09:20+00:00

If the child uncovered a three-mouse display and correctly labeled it the winner plate, he was given a small trinket as a prize, and a new trial of hiding and mixing the plates ensued. If instead he initially uncovered a two-mouse display, the plate was covered, and with no further mixing, the child was invited to find the winner plate. (This was not a particularly hard task, and all the children succeeded at it.) When they identified it as the winner plate, they won a prize.

This procedure continued for 10 or 11 trials of uncovering plates (11 if the 10th plate uncovered was a two-mouse plate). Then, surreptitiously, the game changed. While the child was playing with his pile of trinket prizes, the experimenter made a change to one of the displays. (Different changes were made for different children.) Some of these changes were number-relevant changes—for example, subtracting a mouse from the three-mouse display. Other changes were number-irrelevant—for example, changing the length and/or density of a row of mice on one of the plates. The question was what would happen after this surreptitious change, which appeared to the child to have come about “magically.”

According to Piagetian theory, preschool children do not have a firm understanding of abstract concepts such as number. Thus, they do not differentiate between transformations that affect numerosity (e.g., subtraction or addition) and those that do not (e.g., rearranging the spatial configuration of the mice on a plate). Thus, the children in the “magic” experiment should have reacted the same way to all kinds of changes.

Instead, children showed a great sensitivity to what kind of change was made. For the 48 children experiencing a number-relevant change, 92% showed clear signs of doubt that a winner plate existed after a mouse had been subtracted from the three-mouse plate. In contrast, 94% of the children experiencing a number-irrelevant change claimed that the rearranged mice still comprised a “winner” plate and that the game could go on. Gelman (1972) concluded that these data support the idea that very young children do, in fact, possess a rudimentary understanding of what number is and what kinds of transformations affect it.

Having established that preschoolers do know something about number, Gelman went on to study what they know about counting. With small numbers (i.e., fewer than about five items), even 2- and 3-year-olds can count the number of items in a set. But what does it mean to count? Gelman and her husband Randy Gallistel (1978) offered this surprisingly complicated definition:

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