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One hundred and sixty-three 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children were tested on seven conservationlike number problems. Five were problems of inequivalence and two were problems of equivalance. All problems were presented in a static form so that the children did not see a transformation away from one-to-one correspondence. Few children made the correct numeric judgments on all problems. The youngest performed as well as the oldest on specific problems of inequivalence similar to one used by Mehler and Bever, but all ages performed similarly on the other problems of inequivalence and equivalence. The similarity between the oldest and youngest children does not seem to provide evidence of similarity in cognitive functioning. Rather the youngest appeared to be senstive to differences but not to relate them systematically, while the oldest children logically related differences in spatial properties to number. Three developmentally ordered models are proposed.

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