Children between 2 years, 6 months old and 3 years, 2 months old correctly discriminate the relative number of objects in two rows; between 3 years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months they indicate a longer row with fewer objects to have  more ; after 4 years, 6 months they again discriminate correctly. The discriminative ability of the younger children shows that the logical capacity for cognitive operations exists earlier than previously acknowledged

Bever, Thomas G.

Mehler, Jacques

University of Northern Iowa

Iowa Science Teachers Journal Volume 6 Number 4 Article 12 1969 Cognitive Capacity of Very Young Children Jacques Mehler Massachusetts Institute of Technology Thomas G. Bever Massachusetts Institute of Technology Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/istj  Part of the Science and Mathematics Education Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits you Copyright © Copyright 1969 by the Iowa Academy of Science Recommended Citation Mehler, Jacques and Bever, Thomas G. (1969) "Cognitive Capacity of Very Young Children," Iowa Science Teachers Journal: Vol. 6 : No. 4 , Article 12. Available at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/istj/vol6/iss4/12 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa Academy of Science at UNI ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Iowa Science Teachers Journal by an authorized editor of UNI ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@uni.edu. Cognitive Capacity of Very Young Children~ Children between 2 years, 6 months old and 3 years, 2 months old correct-ly discriminate the relative number of objects in two rows; between 3 years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months they indicate a longer row with fewer objects to have "more"; afrer 4 years, 6 months they again discriminate cor-rectly. The discriminative ability of the younger children shows that the logical capacity for cognitive opera-tions exists earlier than previously ac-knowledged. J. Piaget has investigated the mis-takes which children make in solving simple problems ( 1 ) . In the most often quoted of Piaget's experiments, a child sees two identical arrays of material and is asked if he, in fact, thinks they are "the same." For ex-ample, a child of four characteristical-ly replies that the two identical rows of four pellets in Fig. la are, in fact, "the same." The experimenter then adds or substracts some material in one of the arrays and changes its shape at the same time. He again *Reprinted from Science, Vol. 158, 6 October, 1967. Copyright: 1969, American Association for the Advancement of Sci-ence. JACQUES MEHLER Department of Psychology Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts THOMAS G. BEVER Department of Psychology Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Cambridge 29 asks the child if both arrays have the same amount of material, or if one has "more." If the array is like the one in Fig. lb, the same child reports incorrectly that there are now "more" in the upper row. However, a child of 5 correctly indicates that it is the 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 a 0 0 0 0 000000 b 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 C Figure 1 The length of the rows in (a) was 7 inches (18 cm) for M &M's and 8 inches (20 cm) for clay pellets; in (b) 7 and 3 inches (18 and 8 cm) for M & M's and 8 and 5 inches (20 and 13 cm) for clay pet-lets. There was a rn-inch (3-cm) space be-tween each of the four clay pellets and a 2-inch (5-cm) space between each of the four M & M's. The clay pellets were ½ inch (1 .3 cm) in diameter. The M & M candies were all of the same color. array with the added material which has "more." Various experimental techniques have been used to isolate the ages at which children develop the ability to ignore particular kinds of changes and to recognize when material is "con-served" ( that is, not perceived as modified in quantity), in spite of those apparent changes. The develop-ment of the different kinds of quan-tity conservations is interpreted by Piaget as a behavioral reflection of the development of general cognitive capacities. For example, the 4-year-old's failure to conserve quantity in the above pellet experiment indicates that he does not have the cognitive capacity to "reverse" situations; hence, he cannot transform Fig. lb back to Fig. la and then recall which partic-ular row had the two pellets added to it. He instead responds to the mo-mentary "appearance" of the two rows in Fig. lb and incorrectly re-ports that the longer row has "more." All of the well-known experiments on the conservation of quantity have ignored children below the age of 4. The exclusion of younger children has appeared rational because 4-year-old children do not have quantity conser-vation. If a 4-year-old does not have conservation, why should we expect an even younger child to exhibit it? Although this argument was reason-able, it was also misleading. The present study of over 200 children shows that under 3 years 2 months ( 3-2), children exhibit a form of quantity conservation; they lose it as they get older and do not exhibit it again until they are about 4 years 6 months ( 4-6). Seven age groups of children from 2-4 to 4-7 were tested in individual sessions with two experiments involv-ing quantity judgments. Each exper-iment us·ed two pairs of rows like those shown in Fig. 1, a and b. One of the experimental sequences for each child had clay pellets while the other had M & M candies ( candy-coated chocolate pellets). In each ex-perimental sequence, the child was first presented with adjacent rows of four, as in la, and he was asked if they were the "same." The experi-menter then modified the arrays into a situation like lb, in which a short row of six is adjacent to a longer row of four. In the experiment with clay pellets he was then asked which row had "more." In the experiment with M & M's the responses to situation lb were nonverbal: instead of asking the child to state a quantity judgment, the experimenter asked him to "take the row you want to eat, and eat all the M & M's in that row." The order in which the M & M experiment and clay experiment were presented was balanced for each age group, as was the orientation of the arrays on the table in front of the child ( 2). Each session took about 10 minutes. The experimenter wrote down the response of the subject, and a tape recording was taken for subsequent analysis. The valid responses ( 3) are sum-marized by age in Fig. 2; the ordinate represents the proportion of success in choosing or naming the row which, in fact, had more ( that is, the propor-tion of "conserving" responses) and the abscissa represents increa,sing age. Two bar graphs are presented, one for choosing which row of clay pel-lets had "more," ( Fig. 2a) and one for taking a row of M & M's (Fig. 30 z 0 g:: < ~ 100 90 80 70 ,_ 60 so -22 CLAY a 26 ~ 30 36 ~ C/) z 0 u c., z ~ ;~~ L..._.l:c<i:i:1-=i---=~.:;.;;:~~'"'"!'-il I i 0 ::r: C/) C/) ~ C/) B lOOr p... 90 C/) ~ u.. 0 E-< z ~ u ei::: ~ A-. 80 70 40 -30-20t-2-4 2-8 3-0 3-4 3-8 4-0 4-4 TO TO TO TO TO TO TO 2-7 2-11 3-3 3-7 3-11 4-3 4-7 M&M -21 28 26 - 22 b cent of verbal responses on the quan-tity of clay pellets and 81 per cent for taking rows of M & M's. The de-crease with age is strongly signifi-cant for the verbal judgments ( P < .001 by chi-square comparing 2-4 to 2-7 and 4-0 to 4-3 ages for verbal judgments) and nonsignificant for re-S{>Onses to M &M's. At 4-6, the chil-dren again show conservation for both kinds of quantity judgment ( signifi-cance of increase in conservation of clay pellets between 4-0 to 4-3 and 4-4 to 4-7 = P < .01; for eating of M & M's, P < .01 by chi-square). QL-JZ:la...£=....lli:=--=~=- ==--="-Occasionally children responded one way on verbal judgments of which clay row had "more," yet in the case of M & M's they took the other row to eat. This might show some uncertainty in the child's ca-pacity to judge quantity. To s·trength-en our basic finding that children at 2-6 and 4-6 show more conservation than children of 4-2, we separated those children who showed consistent responses on both M & M's and clay pellets from children with inconsistent responses. Among the children who gave consistent verbal and nonverbal responses, there were more consistent nonconservation responses at age 4-2 than at 2-6 ( P < .02 by chi-square; or at 4-6 ( P < .03 by chi-square) Furthermore, if a child gave incon-sistent responses, it is more likely that the single conserving response was to the M & M's than to the clay pel-lets (P < .01 by chi-square in favor of M & M conservation) ( 4). 2-4 2-8 3-0 3-4 3-8 4-0 4-4 TO TO TO TO TO TO TO 2-7 2-11 3-3 3-7 3-11 4-3 4-7 AGE Figure 2 The proportion by age of responses choosing the row with more members in the situation shown in Fig. lb . Numbers inside bars indicate total number of sub-;ects of that age. 2b). Both experiments show a de-crease in conserving responses by age, which is at a minimum in the group between 3-8 and 3-11. Thus, as the children get older than 2-6, they get worse, rather than better, at quantity conservation. Even more striking is the fact that the 23 youngest children ( under 2-8 show extremely high num-bers of conserving responses-100 per 31 Our results indicate that the inabil-ity to conserve quantity is a tempo-rary phase in the developing child. The child does not gradually acquire quantity conservation during his 4th year; rather, he reacquires it. The fact that the very young child successfully solves the conservation problem shows that he does have the capacities which depend on the logical structure of the cognitive operations. Eventually, he develops an explicit understanding of these operations: at age 5 he solves the same problem by counting the pellets in each row. We think that the temporary inability to solve the conservation problem reflects a peri-od of overdependence on perceptual strategies. These strategies develop on the basis of experience with correla -tions of apparent shapes and actual quantity. Surely, it is a general rule that longer arrays usually have "more" components, and a reasonable per-ceptual expectancy would reflect this. Just after the young child incorpor-ates this expectancy into his per-ceptual scheme, he is misled by the apparent length of a row into think-ing that it has more components. The fact that children at all ages tend to take the M & M row with "more" in-dicates that this perceptual strategy can be overcome, given sufficient motivation to do so. Eventually, the child develops a more sophisticated integration of the logical operation with his perceptual strategies which allow him to count the individual members of an array. He then has the capacity to ignore his perceptual expectancies in those critical instances in which they are not confirmed. The intermediate age "nonconserving" child cannot disengage his perceptual strategies in this way. Thus, noncon-servation behavior is a temporary ex-ception to human cognition, not a basic characteristic of man's natiye endowment. 32 REFERENCES AND NOTES 1. J. Piaget, The Child's Conception of Number (Humanities, New York, 1952) ; The Origins of Intelligence in Children (International Univs. Press, New York, 1952). 2. Subjects were children attending local play groups and private nursery schools in the Greater Boston area as well as some participating in the Harvard In-fant Study. Older and younger children were drawn from the same schools and groups whenever possible and were often siblings. 3. Occasionally a child would refuse to re-spond, or would choose the clay pellets or M & M candies one at a time instead of the whole row. These responses were ignored. 4. We also ascertained that the conserva-tion responses in the young children are not due to a tendency to take and to name short rows. Sixteen children, age 2-4 to 2-9, were presented with an ar-ray in which the row with six clay pel-lets or M & M's is in fact longer ( Fig. le). In this condition there were 22 con-servation responses ( picking or naming the long row) and ten nonconservation responses . Out of eight children who re-sponded consistently on M & M's and clay judgments, seven showed consistent conservation responses. This indicates that the young children are attending to the actual quantity in a row. Prelimi-nary analysis indicates that for children below 3 years of age, experimental order of M & M's and clay did not affect the tendency to exhibit conserving responses. 5. Research supported by NIH grant 5-TO l-HD00ll l-02 to Professor Halle at M.I.T. and by NASA grant NaG 496 and by U.S. Department of Defense, Ad-vanced Research Projects Studies and the Harvard Society of Fellows. We thank J. Epstein, who ran all the experiments in this study. We also thank Professor H.-L. Teuber, H. Koopmans, and Dr. M. Garrett for comments on this manu-script; Dr. T. G. R. Bower for the use of his research space, and D. · J. Kagan for providing access to his well studied group of children. We are also grateful to all those schools that kindly allowed us to test their children. 

Cognitive Capacity of Very Young Children

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Cognitive Capacity of Very Young Children

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