Abstract
Adults and third-grade children were given a series of tasks requiring the use of cognitive operations associated with traditional conservation problems. While the adults showed an inability to solve the critical problem in the series, the children solved it easily except in the case when the irrelevant information was made highly salient. These results were interpreted as supporting an account emphasizing perceptual change rather than traditional cognitive change accounts of the development of problem solving.
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The authors wish to thank Frank B. Murray for introducing them to the bead problem. To Jennie Fox and Carlton Odom, two young children who served as pilot subjects and convinced us with their competence that this study would be worth doing, we owe a special debt of gratitude. We are also grateful to the children and staff of Ensworth School for their splendid help and cooperation.
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Odom, R.D., Cunningham, J.G. & Astor, E.C. Adults thinking the way we think children think, but children don’t always think that way: A study of perceptual salience and problem solving. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 6, 545–548 (1975). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03337565
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03337565