Further Investigations of the Young Child's Conception of Number

GELMAN, ROCHEL, and TUCKER, MARSHA F. Further Investigations of the Young Child's Conception of Number. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1975, 46, 167-175. 3 experiments on the nature of the young child's use and understanding of small numbers are reported. The first considers the conditions that might lead Ss to count when making absolute estimates of small set sizes (2-5) and what effect heterogeneity has on accuracy. 144 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were tested with either homogeneous or heterogeneous arrays; all Ss were tested on each number at each of 3 time exposures. 48 3and 4-year-old children were run in the remaining experiments designed to assess Ss' reactions to the effect of a surreptitious substitution of a differently colored item or a different kind of object in an expected array of 3 items. The results of the absolute-judgment experiment are consistent with the assumption that preschoolers will often count when estimating small numbers. They also provide empirical constraints for theoretical accounts of the estimator processes employed by preschoolers, for example, that they can ignore heterogeneity. The subsequent experiments show that young children treat color and identity substitutions as number-irrelevant transformations.