Conservation Accidents Revisited

Abstract

McGarrigle and Donaldson's (1975) claim that the Genevan conservation test procedure underestimates the child's cognitive competence is examined. Experiment 1 reports a successful replication of their original work. We then consider several objections to McGarrigle and Donaldson's claim that the tasks they used did in fact test the child's ability to conserve number. Firstly, as only four counters were used in their study the child's judgment of numerosity could have been perceptually rather than conceptually based (Winer 1974). Secondly, teddy may have acted as a distracting agent leading the child to ignore the post-transformational state of the arrays and to answer the experimenter's post-transformational question (correctly) by mere repetition of his earlier response. In experiment 2 a procedure which is free from these objections, but otherwise similar to McGarrigle and Donaldson's procedure, is employed, together with appropriate comparison conditions. This procedure results in a decrease in the overall incidence of conservation responses, but fails to eradicate the difference between accidental and intentional transformation of the arrays (p < 0.001). In the final part of the paper we consider the implications of these and McGarrigle and Donaldson's results for our understanding of the social psychology of the conservation task.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Brainerd, C.J. , 1972. Judgments and explanations as criteria for the presence of cognitive structures . Psychological Bulletin 79, 172-179 .

Carey, S. , 1977. 'The child as a word learner'. In: M. Halle , G. Miller and J. Bresnan (eds.), Linguistic theory and psychological reality. Cambridge: MIT Press .

Campbell, R. and T. Bowe , 1977. 'Functional asymmetry in early language understanding'. In: G. Drachman (ed.), Salzburg papers in linguistics, IV, Tubingen: Gunter Narr .

Chi, T.H. and D. Klahr , 1975. Span and rate of apprehension in children and adults . Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 19, 434-439 .

Donaldson, M. , 1978. Children's minds. London: Fontana .

Donaldson, M. and P. Lloyd , 1974. 'Sentences and situations: children's judgments at match and mismatch'. In: F. Bresson (ed.), Problemes actuels en psycholinguistique. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique .

Donaldson, M. and J. McGarrigle , 1974. Some clues to the nature of semantic development . Journal of Child Language 1, 185-194 .

Gelman, R. , 1972. Logical capacity of very young children: number invariance rules . Child Development 43, 75-90 .

Frank, F. 1964. Reported in: J.S. Bruner, R.R. Olver and P.M. Greenfield, et al. (1966), Studies in cognitive growth. New York: John Wiley .

10.

Hood, N.B. , 1962. An experimental study of Piaget's theory of the development of numbers in children . British Journal of Psychology 53, 273-286 .

11.

Inhelder, B. and J. Piaget , 1969. The early grown of logic in the child. New York: Norton .

12.

McGarrigle, J. and M. Donaldson , 1975. Conservation accidents cognition 3(4), 341-350 .

13.

Murray, F.B. and S.J. Tyler , 1978. Semantic characteristics of the conservation transformation . Psychological Reports 42, 1051-1054 .

14.

Rose, S.A. and M. Blank , 1974. The potency of context in children's cognition: an illustration through conservation . Child Development 43, 383-406 .

15.

Shatz, M. , 1978. On the development of communicative understandings: an early strategy for interpreting and responding to messages . Cognitive Psychology 10, 271-301 .

16.

Winer, B.J. , 1974. Conservation of different quantities among preschool children . Child Development 45, 830-842 .