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Book Review: The Processing of Information and Structure

Of course one finds Piaget’s typical weaknesses as well, In particular there is his tendency to reify chapter headings (“Perception is rigid and irreversible”), and also to ignore alternative explanations, which are usually quite easy to control for. Children may fail the transitive inference test because they forget the information which they have to put together. They may fail the conservation of volume task simply because they do not understand the experimenter’s questions. Still these are mistakes which can be tidied up, and the pioneering originality of the book is a good enough excuse. The only sadness is that the same mistakes go on being made in 1974 as the second of these two books shows very clearly. No longer pioneers, Piaget and Inhelder wrote it long after apotheosis had set in, in order to give a general and simple account of their theories of development. The book covers the whole of childhood, and is written quite clearly. But we are even further from arguments about the data which are hardly ever mentioned. Most of the ideas will be fairly familiar to anyone who has read any of the reviews of Piaget’s theory, of which there are now a large number. The material which is likely to be least well known is about the way in which adolescents experiment with physical properties. When these children have, for example, to find out whether it is the length or the weight of a pendulum or its initial impetus which determines the speed at which it swings, the younger ones apparently vary everything at once. Older children (14 years or so), on the other hand, vary each factor on its own, holding all the other factors constant: in other words they can conduct a properly controlled experiment. How is it then that adult experimenters, even those concerned with children, often cannot? P. E. BRYANT