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The conservation task developed by Piaget

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What does Piaget's conservation task tell us about young children's thinking?

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As you may know, in the classic version of the conservation task developed by Piaget, the infant is shown two rows of sweets on a table, and asked to confirm that there are same number in each row by being guided to count them. The experimenter then moves one of the rows (row A) such that the gap between each individual sweet is increased, and the row appears longer, but the total number of sweets remain unchanged. The infant is asked the question, 'Are there now more sweets in this row than that row, or are they the same?' It was found that infants in the preoperational period consistently thought there were more sweets in row A and this is taken as evidence for Piaget's theory that they are incapable of thinking about more than one perspective at one time; i.e., unable to 'imagine' ...

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