Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Conservation knowledge and measurement abilities are two central components in quantitative development. Piaget's position is that conservation is a logical pre-requisite of measurement, while Miller's is the reverse. In this paper we illustrate how measurement is employed as an empirical tool in the construction of conservation knowledge. This account predicts the familiar pattern of conservation development from the limits on young children's measurement abilities. We present Q-Soar, a computational model that acquires number conservation knowledge by simulating children's performance in a published conservation training study. This model shows that measurement enables a verification process to be executed which is the basis of conservation learning.