ABSTRACT
Having examined the remembrance of configurations involving rotations and natural co-ordinates, we thought it essential to go on to the remembrance of shapes and spatial magnitudes organized into a system, and subject to a conservation law. However, we saw earlier (Chapter 3) how difficult it is to express conservation problems in terms of memory-images-conservation is not a configuration but a rational relationship involving the transformation of states or configurations. If the transformation is performed by the child himself or in his presence, there is a fair chance that his memory will be purely conceptual or logical, so that success or failure will depend solely on his operational schemata. It is, of course, possible to avoid this difficulty, as we tried to do in Chapter 3, by presenting equal magnitudes in different configurations (e.g. three sets of six counters arranged in different ways) on the assumption (which was proved correct) that the remembrance of these distributions must depend on the subject's operational level as well as on his conservation schemata. However, when it comes to the spatial magnitudes (areas) that we are about to discuss, the subject cannot possibly judge them equal unless he makes precise measurements or applies elementary transformations (division and recombination), which he only remembers in part, since all he has been asked to do is to recall the results in terms of shapes and dimensions, etc.
