One of the great things about being a grad student is that you get to do lots of reading. Last term, for a cognition course project, I read stacks of books and papers on embodiment and related topics. This term, I'm trying to get a handle on cognitive development, so I'm reading Piaget to start with. The best parts of all this reading are when the two seemingly different subject areas appear to connect in interesting ways.
First embodiment: one of the clearest conclusions from the many papers I read is that active physical interaction with an object or spatial environment, etc. is better for perceiving and understanding that object or environment than mere passive visual ovservation. (See e.g. Depth perception by the active observer for a nice survey of some facets of this topic.)
Now look at Piaget's conservation of substance task, typically administered to a child before he or she reaches Piaget's concrete operations stage (age seven or so). It typically goes something like this:
- experimenter and child make same-sized balls of clay; child agrees the balls have the same amount of clay
- experimenter rolls one ball into a sausage shape or pancake shape and then asks the child if the sausage or pancake still has the same amount of clay as the remaining ball
- child typically answers no, the sausage or pancake has more clay, presumably because it has one dimension (length or width) bigger than the ball and the child can only focus on one variable at a time.
The thing to note here is that it is the experimenter who makes the sausage or pancake, not the child. Suppose we ran the experiment like this (I've changed the vocabulary to hot dogs (wieners), cookies and play-doh as perhaps more representative of the experience of modern children):
- experimenter and child play with play-doh; child learns to make hot dogs and cookies (perhaps some time before the main experiment)
- experimenter and child make same-sized balls of play-doh; child agrees the balls have the same amount of play-doh
- experimenter asks the child to make a hot dog or cookie out of one ball, then asks the child if the hot dog or cookie has the same amount of play-doh as the remaining ball.
- Child answers yes or no, gives reasons.
Hypothesis: on average, children would succeed at the latter task at an earlier age than at the former. Ditto for Piaget's conservation of number tasks - I'd guess the child who moves the counters into a different configuration himself rather than watching the experimenter do it would catch on to number conservation earlier. Explanation (in light of the research on embodiment): actually handling the conserved object(s) when they change shape or configuration aids with the realization that the amount or number doesn't change.
Has anybody ever looked at doing Piaget's tests this way?
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