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Accessing one‐to‐one correspondence: Still another paper about conservation
Author(s) -
Gelman Rochel
Publication year - 1982
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1982.tb01803.x
Subject(s) - equivalence (formal languages) , psychology , set (abstract data type) , judgement , task (project management) , range (aeronautics) , cognition , cognitive psychology , social psychology , statistics , arithmetic , mathematics , computer science , discrete mathematics , epistemology , philosophy , materials science , management , neuroscience , economics , composite material , programming language
When given experience designed to highlight the fact that the specific cardinal values of sets in one‐to‐one correspondence are the same (or different), three‐ and four‐year‐old children pass the standard number conservation tasks of equivalence and non‐equivalence. The initial training involved set sizes of three and four items; the conservation transfer trials involved set sizes of eight and 10 items. Even where success was defined as being able to give a correct judgement and explanation on at least one task in the small‐set range and one task in the large‐set range, children did well. In Expt 1, 75 and 88 per cent of the three‐ and four‐year‐olds, respectively, met this criterion. In Expt 2 (run by an experimenter who was naïve to the hypotheses and results of Expt 1) 58 and 75 per cent of the respective age groups met the same criterion. It is concluded that the children must have accessed an available, albeit implicit, ability to use one‐to‐one correspondence. Otherwise they could not have passed the large set‐size tasks which are beyond the range they count accurately. The paper ends with a defence of Rozin's (1976) accessing account of cognitive development.