Extent of Similarity in Concept Development for Visually Impaired and Sighted Children

Lister, Caroline; Leach, Chris; Ballinger, Samantha; Simpson, Lucy

doi:10.1080/0300443961170102

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Our analysis tells us that the advance to regarding every member of a set as occupying a unique class of its own is an act of perceptual learning. In support of this view is the fact that blind and partially sighted children have been reported as lagging behind in size but not weight seriation by up to 3 years (Friedman & Pasnak, ; Hatwell, ; Lebron‐Rodriguez & Pasnak, ) but we note these with caution as others have failed to find a difference (Lister, Leach, Ballinger, & Simpson, ).…”

Section: How Does the Resulting Characterization Compare And Contrastmentioning

confidence: 55%

The Development of Size Sequencing Skills: An Empirical and Computational Analysis

McGonigle-Chalmers

Kusel

2019

Monographs Society Res Child

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We explore a long‐observed phenomenon in children's cognitive development known as size seriation. It is not until children are around 7 years of age that they spontaneously use a strict ascending or descending order of magnitude to organize sets of objects differing in size. Incomplete and inaccurate ordering shown by younger children has been thought to be related to their incomplete grasp of the mathematical concept of a unit. Piaget first brought attention to children's difficulties in solving ordering and size‐matching tests, but his tasks and explanations have been progressively neglected due to major theoretical shifts in scholarship on developmental cognition. A cogent alternative to his account has never emerged, leaving size seriation and related abilities as an unexplained case of discontinuity in mental growth. In this monograph, we use a new training methodology, together with computational modeling of the data to offer a new explanation of size seriation development and the emergence of related skills. We describe a connected set of touchscreen tasks that measure the abilities of 5‐ and 7‐year‐old children to (a) learn a linear size sequence of five or seven items and (b) identify unique (unit) values within those same sets, such as second biggest and middle‐sized. Older children required little or no training to succeed in the sequencing tasks, whereas younger children evinced trial‐and‐error performance. Marked age differences were found on ordinal identification tasks using matching‐to‐sample and other methods. Confirming Piaget's findings, these tasks generated learning data with which to develop a computational model of the change. Using variables to represent working and long‐term memory (WM and LTM), the computational model represents the information processing of the younger child in terms of a perception‐action feedback loop, resulting in a heuristic for achieving a correct sequence. To explain why older children do not require training on the size task, it was hypothesized that an increase in WM to a certain threshold level provides the information‐processing capacity to allow the participant to start to detect a minimum interval between each item in the selection. The probabilistic heuristic is thus thought to be replaced during a transitional stage by a serial algorithm that guarantees success. The minimum interval discovery has the effect of controlling search for the next item in a principled monotonic direction. Through a minor additional processing step, this algorithm permits relatively easy identification of ordinal values. The model was tested by simulating the perceptual learning and action selection processes thought to be taking place during trial‐and‐error sequencing. Error distributions were generated across each item in the sequence and these were found to correspond to the error patterns shown by 5‐year‐olds. The algorithm that is thought to emerge from successful learning was also tested. It simulated high levels of success on seriation and also on ordinal identif...

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Section: How Does the Resulting Characterization Compare And Contrastmentioning

confidence: 55%