Conservation and executive function (EF) are important early childhood skills; however, knowledge about their relationship is scarce. Hence, in this study, this relationship is investigated, and a comparison is conducted between the Piagetian conservation and EF tasks to obtain the total hemoglobin (mMmm) for the left and right brain activity in…

Findings on 20 children who passed an area conservation task and 20 who didn't suggested that conserving children applied an additive rule, while nonconserving children presented patterns suggesting centration on one of the two dimensions. Implications for Anderson's and Piaget's conceptions of conservation development are discussed. (RH)

This paper discusses research on how concepts differ in their internal organization and how these differences interact with and affect cognitive processing in children. Two types of natural concepts are focused on: classes (nouns with class-inclusion organization, such as "trees,""students,""soldiers" and collections…

Topics briefly discussed include awareness or consciousness, recollection, reconstitution, and conceptualization; the nature of causal exploration and contradiction; and conservation. Examples are provided in relation to children's perception. For related articles, see TM 501 289 and 290. (RC)

The article describes research which attempted to discover whether emotionally disturbed children functioned at Piagetian levels of abstract thought similar to normal children. (CD)

Twenty first-graders observed an adult model perform a quantity conservation task. The children were then tested on a series of generalization tasks immediately, after one week, and after three months. The results suggested that the social experience of observation appeared to activate a cognitive restructuring of the children's mental operations.…

Explores the hypothesis that there is a decline in operational thought ability in the elderly. Two samples of elderly males, with mean ages of 71.80 and 74.29 years respectively, were tested for their ability to conserve mass, surface areas and volume. (BD)

Describes the intellectual development stages ascribed to children by Jean Piaget. Characteristics and examples are given for sensori-motor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational thinking periods. Implications are given for elementary school science education, including (1) formal instruction does not accelerate acquisition…

Suggests that although Piaget's psychological theory is developmental and dialectical in a general way, the lack of a developed philosophical basis leads to the subordination of a dialectical approach to static, anti-dialectical concepts. Hegel's theory of interaction and contradiction is examined to show that dialectical theory has a precise…

Perceptual counterparts of a series of conservation of length tests were presented to subjects who were categorized as conservers or nonconservers conservation of length pre-tests, and to conservers and nonconservers given conservation length training. Perceptual performance of the untrained nonconservers was significantly worse than that of the…

Piaget's concept of "internalization" is analyzed and related to Bruner's representational theories of cognitive development. Cognitive structures are shown to be real exclusively in an actual representation. (Author/SDH)

This paper offers a social learning explanation for age-related changes in children's cognitive functioning. Three hypotheses have been derived from the assumption of Piaget that structures play the preeminent role in cognitive development: (1) a child can not profit from or even appreciate experiences which are meaningful at a higher stage of…

In two experiments (N=210) conservers, transitional conservers, and nonconservers were directed to lie or pretend to other children that their judgments and explanations of a series of conservation problems were the opposite of what they really were. Nonconservers and transitional subjects in both studies made large and significant gains in…

Normal and retarded children's use of color, number, length and continuous quantity as attributes of identification was assessed by presenting them with contrived changes in three properties. Surprise and correct memory responses for color preceded those to number, which preceded logical verbal responses to a conventional number-conservation task.…