A four year old child sits in front of a heap of wooden blocks and tries to stand them in a straight line in order of size. There is no doubt that he understands the task, for he can distinguish between correct and incorrect solutions. Yet no matter how he arranges and rearranges the blocks, they seem obstinately to refuse to be aligned into the desired staircase like pattern. A year later he does much better: he can seriate six blocks differing in length by about an inch. But faced with eight of the blocks, or with six blocks differing by only half an inch, he is again unable to complete the task. He manages to build an ordered line, but leaves out one or two of the blocks: or perhaps he organises the blocks into two distinct lines and then finds himself unable to combine them. A year later still and he is now an accomplished performer. Presented with any seriation task involving the wooden blocks he carries it out smoothly, confidently, and correctly [1].

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Bibliographic Information

Book Title: Seriation by Children
Book Subtitle: An Artificial Intelligence Analysis of a Piagetian Task
Authors: Richard M. Young
Series Title: Interdisciplinary Systems Research
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-5557-0
Publisher: Birkhäuser Basel
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive
Copyright Information: Springer Basel AG 1976
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-7643-0819-3Published: 01 January 1976
eBook ISBN: 978-3-0348-5557-0Published: 11 November 2013
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 325
Topics: Science, Humanities and Social Sciences, multidisciplinary

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