«Why do you ask?» context and communication in the conservation task |
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| Authors: | Paul Light Caroline Gorsuch Julie Newman |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Psychology, University of Southampton, S09 5NH, Southampton, England
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| Abstract: | Modifications of conservation tasks designed to increase their ‘social intelligibility’ have frequently been shown to improve young children’s performance. Several studies in this area have involved introducing an emphasis on fairness of distribution, but the significance of this factor has not been independently assessed. Another factor to which attention has recently been drawn concerns the child’s understanding of the experimenter’s intentions in asking the conservation question. Perner (1984) has reported that young children responded more accurately when the question was asked by an experimenter who had not witnessed the earlier stages of the procedure. This paper reports an experiment in which these two factors — the emphasis on fairness and the introduction of a naive experimenter—were manipulated independently. One hundred and twelve 4–6 year olds were divided between four conditions and tested in pairs on a task involving conservation of discontinuous quantity. The results offered clear evidence that emphasising fairness through the device of a competitive game did increase the frequency of correct responses. The introduction of a second experimenter to ask the conservation question also had a significant, if more limited, facilitative effect. Possible social and cognitive processes underlying these results are discussed. |
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