ABSTRACT
In this experiment the subjects have to build a railway track between two points A and B, fixed in advance. A and B are the ends of two straight rails that have already been placed on the table. The subjects are asked to fit together a certain number of curved and straight rails in order to make all the possible tracks between A and B. As in the other studies reported in this book, the children's progress is observed and at each level of success, which in these tasks is not very rapid, we try to find answers to the following questions. What is the content of the subject's conceptualized cognizance at each level of success in action? Furthermore, depending on whether this cognizance bears on the observable features or on the coordinations, what part is played by "empirical" ab stractions and what part by "reflexive" abstractions? In effect, this problem principally concerns space, given the isomor phism between the subject's geometry and the object's space
insofar as the latter can be dissociated from its temporal, kinetic, and dynamic context: in the experiments described below, this context plays only a minor role.
