ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that there are some serious problems about the design of the experiment, and reasons for doubting that it actually shows anything very definite about the young child's understanding of invariance. There are two patterns of behaviour to be explained: the so-called 'conservation response' typical of the older child, and the 'non-conservation response' found in children under six or seven years of age. Jean Piaget's conclusion about the conservation response is uncontroversial and almost certainly correct. Piaget's second conclusion, which concerns the children who fail in the conservation task poses much greater problems of interpretation. His suggestion is that such children believe that reorganizing the spatial arrangement of a row of counters actually changes the number of counters in it. J. S. Bruner and his colleagues have shown that children who would normally fail conservation tasks do have some memory of the appearance of a display before a transformation.
