The “Failure to Communicate a Change of Mind” Explanation of Young Children's Nonconservation Responses

Abstract

Piaget attributed young children's failure on his conservation tasks to the fact that they lack the concepts concerned. One alternative hypothesis is that the failure merely reflects the indirect nature of the question asked. It is possible that the transformation leads the child to discard as incorrect his or her earlier estimate of the relative quantities in the two sets and that this change of mind goes unnoticed because of the nature of the test question. This hypothesis predicts that if a direct question were used, nonconservers would respond correctly and that this would be so even if other task features were varied. Such a direct question is employed in identity conservation tasks, in which only a single set of objects is present. In an experiment employing 76 children, mainly 5-year-olds, performance was compared on two number-identity conservation tasks that differed in the extent to which the shape deformation produced was made salient. It was found that the task presenting a greater level of perceptual seduction was significantly harder than the other task. Taken together with other evidence, the results suggest that the “change of mind” hypothesis may be rejected.