Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The project investigated the nature of young children's physics knowledge and the architecture of its development. I utilized two contexts of development for this purpose: comparison of cross-age developments in knowledge of a domain and finegrained analysis of developments that occurred in the context of problem-resolution.The empirical base consisted of three conditions, under which preschoolers were asked to establish equilibrium on the pan balance. Analysis focused on the child's transformation of a number-based to a weight-based approach to the problem. All the conditions employed the same nine sets of elements to be balanced; the conditions varied a) whether or not the child received feedback from the apparatus and b) order of set presentation (total n= 56). A sequence of fine-grained analyses of the videotaped data lead to a view of children's physics knowledge as localized and context-sensitive;with the steps involved in its development as remarkably limited in extension : in a) the scope within which they come to represent weight or weight differences (e.g. discrete elements versus collective weight of elements in a pan) b) the scope of contexts in which they come to view weight as relevant to the goal of mechanical equilibrium and c) the bounds of diagnostic and causal implications