Shani's Conservation Task

         As we moved on in AP Psychology this week, we moved on in life as well. We passed on from physical development to cognitive development. We were exposed to the ideas of Piaget, who brought many new psychological findings to light.

         Piaget was the first to propose the concept of schemas. A schema is a broad concept of a certain idea and it involves assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is where new ideas are put into an existing box or schema. This is especially prominent in young children, for instance, when they see a new animal, like a zebra, they might call it a horse, because a zebra looks like a horse (to some degree). Once children are taught the difference, they go through accommodation, where they change and reshape their existing schema to reflect new information, so now they would change their schema to fit "zebra".

         Piaget also proposed that there were four stages of cognitive development. The first is the sensorimotor, from 0-2 years old, where infants explore the world through senses and movement. The second is the preoperational, from 2-6 years old, where children use and recognizes symbols (words represent objects and vice versa), they are egocentric, and they cannot think in a logical and scientific way. In the next stage, concrete operational 7-12 year olds begin to think logically and think in a way that Piaget calls "mental operations". In the last stage, 12-adult years take the leap from concrete thinking to abstract thinking, where they don't require objects to think.

         One of the ideas that comes up within these stages is conservation. Conservation is being able to see something as being the same even when the shape changes. We learned that young children to not have the concept of conservation, and therefore cannot see that when water goes from a small cup to a large cup, the actual amount of water does not change. While learning this, I thought there could be no better way to see if this was true than to test it out myself!

Watch and enjoy me testing this out on Eitan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtwMl-i9DOs&feature=youtu.be

For some reason, Eitan thought that the water in the short containers wasn't an equal amount until we told him that it was. Any ideas as to why this is?