Water-level task

Abstract: Piaget and Inhelder (1956) demonstrated that children less than nine years old have little understanding of the concepts of horizontal ity and verticality, despite the abundance of horizontal and vertical references in the environment. They reported research in which sub jects were shown a bottle one-quarter filled with water and asked to indicate the position of the water surface for bottles in various oblique orientations. Subjects who did not understand the concept of horizontally typically depicted the water surface in oblique positions. Piaget and Inhelder believed that understanding of horizontality de velops through several well-defined stages and is only fully achieved somewhere in late childhood coincident with the emergence of con crete operations. Since Piaget and Inhelder's (1956) early observations there have been no systematic developmental studies of the acquisition of horizontality. That is, recent water-level studies have tested subjects from a restricted age range (e.g., nursery school or second grade) and have been most concerned with the effectiveness of particular training conditions on the acquisition of horizontality (e.g., Beilin, Kagan, & Rabinowitz, 1966) or with the relationship between horizon tality and other concepts such as distance conservation (Shantz & Smock, 1966). Furthermore, there is evidence that some college stu dents, who should be expected to have mastered the necessary con crete operations, do not understand the concept of horizontality (Rebelsky, 1964), and may in fact have difficulty learning it (Thomas, Jamison, & Hummel, 1973). Such findings raise questions about Piaget's theory as well as about general learning theories which might predict that understanding should emerge earlier in life given the numerous environmental opportunities for discovering horizontality. In this paper. Studies I and II provide normative information on the development of horizontality, which allows for an evaluation of Piaget's stages and for differences due to age, sex, bottle shape, and

Abstract: Publisher Summary Piaget and Inhelder devised the water level task to study children's progressive understanding of the spatial-coordinate system. Subjects were presented a rectangular-shaped bottle half-filled with water. They were then shown a similar empty bottle, which the researchers tilted at various angles. For each angle of inclination, the subjects had to indicate the direction of the water level, under the assumption that this bottle was half-filled with water. Results showed that different patterns of errors were typical of the preoperational and concrete-operational developmental stages. This chapter examines relevant data and the available developmental models related to water level invariant. Motivated by the empirical facts that emerge from the review, it also summarizes a neo-Piagetian model that was proposed in the 1960s but that had little impact on subsequent published work. This model actually predicted many of the empirical results obtained in the 1970s and 1980s, facts that other published models cannot explain. The model was based on theoretical assumptions that more recently might be seen as anticipating aspects of the functional architecture that connectionistheural modeling has explicitly brought to the fore. Liben emphasized the importance of general developmental theories, and their explication of task performances, to clarify the processes that generate the data on spatial cognition. To highlight from the start major controversial issues that the water level task (the problem of developmental acquisition of its spatial invariant) brings to light, the chapter begins with a brief examination of some recent cognitive-developmental theories that were directly addressed to the water level task and are presented as an alternative to Piagetian and neo-Piagetian theorizing.