ABSTRACT
Conservation
One of the most well studied phenomena in cognitive development is conservation. Conservation involves the belief in the continued equivalence of two physical quantities over a transformation that appears to alter one of them. An example of conservation presents a child with two identical rows of evenly spaced objects. Once the child agrees that the two rows have the same number of objects, the experimenter transforms one of the rows, e.g., by pushing its items closer together. Then the experimenter asks the child whether the two rows still have the same amount or whether one of them now has more. Piaget (1965) and other researchers found that children below about six years of age respond that one of the two rows, usually the longer row, now has more than the other. In contrast, children older than six years respond that the two rows still have equal amounts, i.e., they conserve the equivalence of the two amounts over the compressing transformation.
