Early studies of moral judgement described young children's thought as undifferentiated and oriented toward external festures of transgressions. However, more recent evidence suggests that young children distinguish between domains of social transgression and justify moral judgements with reference to the transgression itself, rather than to external features such as rules, authority directives, or sanctions. The present study hypothesized a possible explanation for this discrepancy: that undifferentiated reasoning occurs with the use of unfamiliar stimulus events or stimulus events not clearly differentiated with respect to social domain. Sixty-one 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds were interviewed about four types of social transgression: familiar moral, unfamiliar moral, familiar conventional, and unfamiliar conventional. Assessments were made of several dimensions of judgement hypothesized to be criteria1 for the differentiation of social domains; responses were also analysed for types of justification used. For familiar stimuli all age groups showed a differentiated understanding of moral and conventional issues, both in judgement and in justification. Younger subjects showed less differentiation in judgement than older subjects when stimuli were unfamiliar. Age differences were also found in the types of justification given, both for familiar and for unfamiliar moral issues. The findings indicate that stimulus familiarity is a more significant factor in the moral reasoning of younger than of older children.

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Piaget introduced a category-theoretic formulation of cognitive development in the late 1960s and extended it during the 1970s. The new theory, which has received surprisingly little attention from cognitive developmentalists, is interpreted in this article as an organizing theme of Piaget’s investigations into such diverse topics as functions, correspondences, commutability, equilibration, reflective abstraction, and the opening of possibilities. The concept of morphism, which is central to the category-theoretic formalism, is discussed and examples of tasks useful for studying this concept are described. A number of implications of the new model and possible future directions are then explored. It is concluded that the new formulation offers the potential for an integrated model of cognitive process and cognitive structure, and is therefore a significant contribution to constructivist theory.

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