Poster #37 - Preschool Children Honor the One-one Counting Principle

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Three-year-old children can detect errors in a puppet’s counting when it violates the counting principles, for example, the one-one principle that requires that each object in a collection be counted once and once and only with a unique tag (Gelman & Gallistel, 1978; Gelman & Meck, 1983). However, researchers have argued that three-year-old children’s understanding of the one-one principle is relatively poor, and they skip or double-count the items when counting (Briars & Siegler, 1984; Frye, Braisby, Lowe, Maroudas, & Nicholls, 1989). We adapted Chesney and Gelman’s (2015) adult study for preschool children and tested their honoring of the one-one principle in a count. In their study (Chesney & Gelman, 2015), adults were presented with pictures of identical objects and their reflections in the mirror, and they found that adults only counted the objects. In the current study, the children were presented a set of three-dimensional identical objects (x = 1,2,3) in front of a mirror. If children lack the implicit one-one counting principle, when they were asked “how many X?”, they should count all the visual objects, that is 2, 4 and 6, respectively. If they do understand the one-one principle, then they should not double count the reflections in the mirror. Fifty-four 3- to 5-year-old children (18 in each age group) were tested, and among the children who could count up to 2, 4 and 6 correctly (3-yr-olds: 83%, 61%, 39%, 4-yr-olds: 100%, 83%, 72%, 5-yr-olds: 100%, 100%, 100%, respectively), they honored the “one-one” counting principle (Binomial test (1/2), 3s: p < 0.001, 4s: p < 0.001, 5s: p < 0.001). That is, they did not double count the reflections of the objects in the mirror. The study provides evidence that even 3-year-old children do honor the implicit one-one counting principle within the small number range. These results provide a challenge to the theorists who hold the view that young children’s counting is due to non-numerical processes (e.g., memorization of count words and paired association with sets).

Authors

• Rochel Gelman, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author

• Shuqi Yang, University of Hong Kong
  Non-Presenting Author