Cognitive Development in Children

Look at the two photos above. Non-preschool-aged readers of this chapter will recognize that, on the left, the amount of clay in the pancake and ball shapes could very well be comparable, and that, on the right, those two containers could contain the same amount of juice. Of course, it’s hard to make an exact comparison just by looking at these pictures. But we adults recognize that the shape of the clay and the “height” of the juice levels do not tell us all that we need to know when it comes to estimating volume. As we will review in this section, this is actually a complicated question that causes younger children some difficulty.