Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper investigates two contexts of children's developing knowledge of the physical world: (1) the macro-context of different age cohorts (8-9 years versus 11-12 years); and (2) the micro-context of a one-hour experimental session. Twenty subjects were video-taped, constructing goal-states for a task inolving gears. Four distinct systemic approaches or problem spaces were identified: (a) Euclidean, (b) Kinematic, (c) Dynamic, and (d) Topological. The Arithmetic Modifier, effecting a numerical charaterization of a problem space, can operate on any of the four. Cross-age, there was the substantial overlap of inital problem space emplyed, and minimal overlap of a final problem space. This frequency of adaptive shift in problem space, strongly and positively correlated with age, suggests that, when confronted with an unfamiliar task domain, the capacity to recognize a problem space as inappropriate and to evoke another more adequate problem space appears to be a component of the answer to the classic question, "What develops?"