RE: Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Feb 05 2003 - 23:39:30 MST

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    Brett writes

    > I don't reckon personality could have the same meaning when
    > a neo-nate is the referent as opposes to say a five year old
    > child because of the still-developing brain. Piaget outlines
    > stages of development/learning that most children go through.
    > The actual stages still seem to hold true even though the rate
    > at which a particular child goes through them can vary.

    It's important to know that in important ways, Piaget has
    been debunked. One of his famous experiments was to observe
    that young children were incapable of "conservation" in the
    following: present a row of jelly beans to a young child,
    and have him note the quantity of beans. Then separate
    the beans by a somewhat larger distance, so as to make the
    row longer. When you ask the child, say four years old or
    so, whether there are more or not, the child will reply
    that there is more.

    I used to wonder (just a little) about this, thinking that
    perhaps the communication wasn't reliable, and that perhaps
    the child didn't know what you meant by "more". But I
    assumed that Piaget had taken this into account---after all,
    I did a term paper on him, and knew that he had spent years
    on this stuff.

    However, later research shows that indeed there was a problem,
    as exposed when the experiment is done this way: the adult
    sets up a row of jelly beans, and gets the child to notice
    their extent. Then the adult experimenter pretends to be
    distracted and turns away for a moment while a colleague
    manipulates a puppet bear who arranges the beans in a longer
    format.

    The experimenter turns around and says, "oh the silly bear
    has been here. Is the amount of beans the same or not?"
    This time, the children (even at very early ages) answer
    correctly.

    So it's interesting to speculate on what is going on in the
    mind of the child, especially in Piaget's experiments. The
    child sees this all-knowing and very powerful adult rearrange
    the beans, and the child can see that the adult has all the
    information. So when the adult asks the seemingly stupid
    question "are there more?", the child figures that the adult
    must be getting at something else, perhaps the length of the
    configuration.

    Lee



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