Understanding Changes In Time: The Development Of Diachronic Thinking In 7-12 Year Old Children

Understanding Changes in Time Understanding Changes in Time The development of diachronic thinking in 7- to 12-year-o...

Author: Jacques Montang

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Understanding Changes in Time

Understanding Changes in Time The development of diachronic thinking in 7- to 12-year-old children

Jacques Montangero With the collaboration of Jean-Pierre Cattin, Sylvain Dionnet, Alexandra Jaussi, Danielle Maurice-Naville, Stefano Monzani, Silvia Parrat-Dayan, Francisco Pons, Pierre Scheidegger and Anastasia Tryphon

Translated by Tim Pownall

UK Taylor & Francis Ltd, 1 Gunpowder Square, London EC4A 3DE USA Taylor & Francis Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007 © Jacques Montangero, 1996 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publisher. First published 1996 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Library Catalogue Record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-45057-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-45811-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 7484 0470 8 (Print Edition) ISBN 0 7484 0471 6 (Pbk) Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data are available on request

Contents

Acknowledgments Chapter 1

vii

Diachronic Thinking: Known Facts and Unanswered Questions

1

Time as a knowledge perspective

1

The diachronic approach and scientific discovery

2

A hypothesis concerning the role of the diachronic approach in everyday thought

5

The foundations of diachronic thinking in young children

6

Unanswered questions concerning the nature and development 10 of the diachronic approach Chapter 2

Chapter 3

The Development of the Diachronic Approach in Children aged 7–8 to 11–12: Method and Population

13

Theoretical and methodological framework

13

Questions asked and tasks set

15

Variations in the contents and context of knowledge

17

The population studied

18

The Evolution of Conceptions of Biological Transformations (the Growth and Decay of Trees)

19

Draw me a growing tree: from change of size to morphological 19 transformation The past and future of a diseased tree: from external discontinuous changes to progressive internally generated transformations

28

The reforestation of the Amazon: representations of cyclical changes in the distant future

40

v

General conclusions to Chapter 3: biological knowledge and the 51 diachronic approach Chapter 4

Chapter 5

The Diachronic Approach and Physical Transformations

55

A story of thawing ice: an introduction to duration in causal explanation

55

The birth of the stars: children’s representations of the origin and expansion of the universe

65

General conclusions to Chapter 4

75

Children as Budding Developmental Psychologists

77

The artist depicts his own progress: children’s conceptions of the development of the ability to draw a human figure

78

The drawings of Tarzan and wild children: the role attributed to 89 maturation and learning in the development of drawing The bigger you get, the better you speak: children’s conceptions 95 of the development of the ability to describe a picture Do we grow more intelligent?: conceptions of intelligence and 111 its development General conclusions to Chapter 5: the intuitive psychology of 125 children concerning cognitive development Chapter 6

The Representation of Changes Associated with Human Activity Which are not Necessarily Predictable

129

The rich will always be ahead of the poor: the comprehension 129 of a sequence of four cartoons Do the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor?: conceptions of wealth and poverty and the possibility of change

140

The traffic jam: measures to improve the traffic flow

148

General conclusions to Chapter 6: diachronic thinking, domains 158 of knowledge and cognitive interaction Chapter 7

General Conclusions. The Diachronic Approach and Diachronic Thinking: Their Nature, Development and Importance for Knowledge

160

The diachronic approach and diachronic thinking

161

The development of diachronic thinking in children aged between 7–8 and 11–12

173

vi

Why study the diachronic approach?

181

References

183

Index

188

Acknowledgments

The 12 experiments reported in this book have been carried out by the collaborators whose names are mentioned on the title page and five experiments have been designed by some of these persons. I am very much indebted to all these researchers for their rich experimental work and for the friendly atmosphere of our collaboration. Many thanks too to the assistants and students in psychology at the University of Geneva who helped us in this experimental work: Brana Gonthier-Pesic, Hélène Duric, Laurence Poget, Nadège Poschung, Sandrine Vuillemier, Miguel Samaniego and Francis Staehli. I also would like to thank the children who were interviewed and their teachers and heads of schools. As far as the preparation of the manuscript is concerned, I was greatly helped by Francisco Pons and Stefano Monzani, to whom I am very grateful. Finally I wish to say how much I appreciated the support of Leïla and of my two children Serge and Agnès during the writing of this book. The experiments reported in the book were carried out thanks to grants of the Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique (grants nos 11–26493.89 and 11–37705.93) and of the Fonds Jean Piaget pour recherches psychologiques et épistémologiques.

Chapter 1 Diachronic Thinking: Known Facts and Unanswered Questions

Time as a Knowledge Perspective Every object of knowledge is situated in time: the idea that occurs to me; the flower or building that meets my gaze; the telling experience I recall to mind. All these things are situated at a precise point in time, are characterized by a certain duration and are ordered within a sequence of events. The study of cognitive psychology cannot therefore afford to ignore the question of the fourth dimension. Indeed, a whole series of studies which I shall describe later has been devoted to investigating the way children conceptualize temporal notions, reason about time or measure events using temporal units. However, these studies are not the subject of this book. What I am interested in here is time as a mode or perspective of knowledge, not as the content of knowledge. In the conclusions to this book I shall define how this term ‘knowledge perspective’ should be understood. For the moment, I shall limit myself to stating that such a perspective is either the dimension within which a reality is framed or the ‘category’ through which it is analyzed in order to be better understood. Thus when confronted with a situation, we may decide to analyze the spatial relations obtaining within it: the relative position of the elements, the overall configuration etc. This is a mode of apprehending the situation which, though not necessarily inescapable, may assist in its comprehension. Similarly, temporality may be employed as a way of apprehending reality. It is not just a dimension of the universe which demands to be structured intellectually as a content of knowledge. Leaving aside the problem of the gradual acquisition of temporal concepts and reasoning, the chapters that follow will be devoted to the study of how children use their temporal knowledge, once acquired, to improve their understanding of things. This placing of the object of knowledge within a temporal perspective is found in science and is known as the diachronic approach or, alternatively, diachronic perspective. This consists of viewing the object within a temporal dimension instead of simply considering it as it presents itself here and now. Such an approach also forms part of everyday thinking. The dual aim of this

2 UNDERSTANDING CHANGES IN TIME

book is to focus attention on the importance of this approach and to attempt to gain a better understanding of it by observing its development in children. The Diachronic Approach and Scientific Discovery There are a number of disciplines which have traditionally focused on the unfolding of events in time. History (in its classic form) is probably the oldest of these disciplines. But does this mean that it is founded on a genuinely diachronic approach? I believe not. I consider the diachronic approach to be a perspective which is not content to describe things in time but instead attempts to understand their development and find in the temporal dimension the explanation for a current state of affairs. More precisely, the diachronic approach views a present situation as one moment within an evolutive process. In this way, we can explain such a situation, at least in part, by reference to what has occurred in previous stages or in the light of its predicted future development. In this interpretation, history is only truly diachronic in conception when it attempts to explain a given event or state of affairs by elucidating the stages which preceded it and the evolutive process which these stages reveal. As historic events are swayed to a significant extent by elements of chance, they can of necessity only be partly explained in terms of developmental processes. Of the relatively long-established disciplines, etymology and historical grammar adopt a truly diachronic approach when they attempt to come to a better understanding of the current state of certain aspects of language by returning to the earliest state that can be reconstructed. At this point I should like to emphasize the crucial contribution of this type of approach in the field of scientific creativity. While modern science dawned when Galileo had the idea of adding time to movement in the description of physical reality, many astonishing discoveries in the history of scientific development have resulted from the application of a diachronic approach to what previously appeared to be an intractable problem or field of knowledge. The most striking example which, because it has inspired so many other disciplines, is also possibly the most fruitful is that of biology in the nineteenth century. The traditional non-evolutionary conception was unable to account for the diversity of living species. At this point Lamarck, inspired by the transformist perspective of Buffon, proposed a theory which no longer held species to be immutable. Viewing the problem as a temporal one, Lamarck suggested that complex species are descended from simpler pre-existing forms. In his Natural History of the Invertebrates, which was published in 1815, he attempted to explain the biological organization of animals and the development of species in terms of a limited number of evolutionary laws. While these laws (development of organs by appetence or in response to a need, inheritance of acquired characteristics) were subsequently to be fundamentally re-examined, the actual idea of the evolution of species together with the concept of evolutionary laws was to become firmly established in biology.

DIACHRONIC THINKING: KNOWN FACTS AND UNANSWERED QUESTIONS 3

It was Darwin who next applied this diachronic approach to the problem of species. It is well known that his theory, advanced in his work The Origin of Species, which was published in 1859, explains the transformation of species in terms of a process of natural selection, itself the result of the struggle for survival. Darwin’s work was to have enormous repercussions and his theory sparked off a number of bitter controversies. It was nevertheless to become the cornerstone of most current thinking on the subject. The evolutionary viewpoint seemed both so new and so rich—and it corresponded so well to the ideology of progress that prevailed at the period— that theorists immediately proposed applying it to the human sciences. It was Spencer, the prophet of progress and eulogist of individualism, who from his very earliest works (Principles of Psychology, 1855) proved to be the prime advocate of the idea. This author considered that the evolutionary viewpoint could be applied to everything: to organisms, of course, but also to the stars and to human phenomena. Spencer’s idea was followed in different fields. In psychology, it is at the root of developmental psychology and genetic epistemology, a field pioneered by J.M.Baldwin (1894). Within this dual discipline, knowledge is studied from a diachronic perspective. Researchers attempt to gain an understanding of it by tracing the evolution of science and observing children’s intellectual development. As we know, this extremely rich approach, which attempts to bring together biology, psychology and epistemology, was developed with considerable success by Piaget. Underlying the theoretical models and the innumerable experimental discoveries contained in the 50 or so books published by this author (see Inhelder, Montangero and Steenken, 1989; Montangero and Maurice-Naville, 1994), we again find a diachronic method. This consists of explaining knowledge in terms of its genesis, that is to say in terms of its origins and the formative processes that give rise to it. An element of knowledge, for example a causal explanation or a logical argument, is not explained simply by its underlying structure but also by the mechanisms which formed it. Moreover, however it is explained, cognitive behaviour is always much better understood when we see how it comes into being and how it develops through childhood. To a large extent, the present-day psychology of cognitive development is a descendant of this application of the diachronic approach to knowledge. Nevertheless, some current research into questions of development is in no way based on this type of approach. In cases, for example, where researchers strive to demonstrate that a 4-month-old infant or a 6-year-old child possesses a particular competence without attempting to explain how this ability came to exist or how it will develop in the future, they are simply making an observation about child psychology, not proposing a truly ‘genetic’ explanation. Nowadays an increasing number of studies published in scientific journals nominally devoted to cognitive ‘development’ fall into this non-genetic category. Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, which as we know led to such a profound transformation in our understanding of human behaviour, is a further result of the


application of a diachronic approach to psychology. In this theory, adult neurotic behaviour is explained by certain vicissitudes which disturbed the affective development of the individual. However, in attaching particular importance to one period during this development while neglecting the role of other stages, Freud fails to exploit the full potential of the diachronic approach. It is not just in biology and the human sciences that new discoveries have been made as a result of this integration of scientific explanations into a temporal perspective. Physicists have also found this approach to be extremely fruitful. The three examples which I shall present below demonstrate that in this discipline a diachronic approach need not necessarily be limited to the model of gradual progress which underlies the traditional idea of evolution. The study of changes occurring in time underlies the scientific understanding of thermodynamics, thanks in particular to the work of Carnot (Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, originally published 1824) and Clausius (The Mechanical Theory of Heat, originally published 1850). These publications ushered in the dawn of a completely new discipline which goes beyond the simple mechanics of heat. The idea of entropy to which this work gave rise can be considered as a law of evolution which does not progress from the simple to the complex but instead from order to disorder or from heterogeneous structure to homogeneous distribution. The concept of entropy has since been transposed to other fields, including communications. In the twentieth century, the adoption of a diachronic perspective has led to important discoveries in other areas of physics. During the 1950s and 1960s two new theories, whose full implications may still remain to be discovered, made their appearance in the fields of physical chemistry and astrophysics. The first of these is the theory of dissipative structures which, according to its originators (see Prigogine and Stengers, 1984), owed its birth to the consideration of time within physico-chemical phenomena. Dissipative structures arise as a consequence of the amplification of random fluctuations within unstable systems. The second of these theories is the big bang theory, together with the variants to which it has given rise. Instead of thinking of the universe as unchanging, today’s researchers view it within a diachronic perspective as an expanding system whose origin has to be explained. The stars, too, are no longer conceived of as unmoving, ageless bodies. Instead they form, develop and wane. They, too, have finally become a part of time. To conclude, we should also note that a number of current developments in molecular biology are due to the interest which has been attracted by the execution of the genetic programme over time. We can see that the considera tion of the temporal dimension of phenomena has not ceased to be a source of inspiration to science.


A Hypothesis Concerning the Role of the Diachronic Approach in Everyday Thought If the approach we are considering here has proved to be so fruitful in the field of scientific research, then what role might it play in the thought of the adult nonscientist or the child? My hypothesis is that at these ‘lower’ (or ‘natural’) levels of thought, the adoption of a diachronic approach again greatly enhances the subject’s understanding of reality. In a metaphorical sense, this enhancement operates in both width and depth. First, in width, because the fact that we consider both the past and future stages of a current situation enlarges the scope of the data on which our thought can bear. Second, in depth, because our explanation of the situation benefits from the addition to the factors present here and now of developmental and transformational processes which are not directly observable. Let us look at some simple, concrete examples. Imagine that a child is interested in the flowers of a fruit tree, the behaviour of a dog or the garden wall. The first step in the comprehension of these experiential data is clearly synchronic in nature. It is necessary to observe closely, compare the elements involved and attach a meaning to them. However, the understanding of these three things will be considerably enriched if the child starts to consider them from a diachronic viewpoint. The flower only assumes its true significance in the light of the knowledge that it will turn into a fruit. The behaviour of the dog will be explained more satisfactorily if it is known that the animal is old or, in contrast, very young. The composition of the wall will only be truly understood once its mode of manufacture has been ascertained. The consequence of our hypothesis is that a diachronic mode of thinking, because it is able to enrich our knowledge of phenomena, can help us uncover more or better solutions to the problems which confront us. Let us imagine that the problem takes the form of a disagreement between two people or a difficulty encountered while producing a computer drawing. Everything leads me to believe that the solutions will be more varied and more relevant if they are proposed by a subject who has gone beyond the here and now to reconstruct the origin of the problem and the steps which have resulted in the current state of affairs. The consideration of the possible or probable future changes is a further important aid in any search for a solution. It remains to be determined whether the adoption of a diachronic approach is always of assistance. It could be hypothesized that such an approach is particularly fruitful for the understanding of certain types of phenomena whereas in other cases its contribution may be somewhat less evident.


The Foundations of Diachronic Thinking in Young Children The chapters which follow will study the development of diachronic thinking in children of 8 to 12 years. It is clear that this mode of thought does not appear ex nihilo in this age bracket: it emerges gradually from the very beginnings of intellectual development. It is this gradual development of the knowledge that underlies diachronic thinking that I shall focus on briefly in this section. This summary will be based on observational data and well-known research results. Infants stop living exclusively in the present as soon as they show themselves capable of anticipations and reconstructions. We can therefore identify the beginnings of diachronic thinking in babies who stop crying when they hear the door to their room open or who are overcome with joy when they see their bottle being prepared. However, it is with the emergence of evocation memory, during the second year of life, that the development of diachronic thinking truly gets under way. For example, a child aged 24 months is taken to his parents’ holiday home which he last visited four months earlier. On arriving in the living room, he makes his way to the window, looks at the meadow beyond and shouts, ‘copter!’. This child is considering a current state (the meadow) and simultaneously evoking a salient memory concerning this meadow: four months ago he saw a helicopter land on it. This behaviour illustrates the beginnings of a diachronic approach which has been made possible by the child’s new evocative capabilities. While evocation memory is a necessary condition for diachronic thinking, it is clearly not a sufficient one. It is also essential that subjects, when confronted by a particular situation, take an interest in its past or future states. Such curiosity can be observed in children aged between 3 and 5 in the form of questions concerning the origins of beings and things. The phenomena of birth and growth stimulate the curiosity of young children who then sometimes apply these concepts to inanimate objects. Thus Piaget (1972a) reports that one of his daughters who was looking at a mountain wondered whether this had originally been a stone which someone had planted in the ground. In order to think diachronically, it is necessary to represent changes along the time arrow. This notion of temporal unidirectionality appears at an early age in children. It is not, however, understood as a characteristic which is attributed to time. It instead relates to an awareness of the irreversibility of certain phenomena. A pilot experiment which I conducted several years ago demonstrated that children aged 4 and 5 attribute a fixed sequential order to photographs presented to them in pairs. For example, they believe that a photograph of an empty glass necessarily follows that of a full one, or that a picture of three birds on a riverbank necessarily precedes one of ten birds on this same riverbank. In my opinion, such a powerful early concept of irreversibility is based on a number of forms of knowledge and knowledge contents which introduce unidirectional links between successive states.


First of all, we should note that the planning of any action implies a fixed sequential order. Small children know perfectly well that they must perform certain actions of a procedural nature (the means) before being able to indulge in the activities associated with the desired objective. Second, the concept of causal links which appears at an early age, as a number of studies have shown (for example Bullock, 1985; White, 1988), lies at the origin of a form of irreversibility. In the reality that children experience, certain causes are invariably followed by an effect and these effects never precede their cause. Third, the work of Nelson (1986) has shown that 3-year-old children already have a knowledge of elementary scripts. We know that scripts are generalized event representations with sequences of actions such as those involved in going to a restaurant or boarding an aeroplane. For example, small children know the sequence of actions that follows their getting up in the morning. They are washed before being dressed. Then they eat before leaving for the kindergarten. Similarly, they know the sequence of actions performed by their mothers when they bake a cake: first of all mother prepares the dough, then she mixes in the fruit before putting the cake in the oven. Another important source of the idea of irreversibility is knowledge of biological growth (Gelman, 1993). At approximately the age of 3 years, children expect living beings to change over time in accordance with a number of predictable laws. They expect size to increase regularly with age. At age 6, children also expect the complexity of organisms to increase with growth. Furthermore, children’s very early experiences and interests teach them that the passage of time may bring decay. Toys wear out and break, flowers wither and the leaves of trees turn yellow and fall. The idea of death as the inescapable end of any life process clearly plays an important role in the propensity of human thought to project itself into the future or take refuge in the past. However, for the young child this idea is difficult to understand in a diachronic sense. Children do not exactly consider death to be the termination of a process; rather they see it as one precisely delineated event. In a review of the literature on the subject, Carey (1985) pointed out that children younger than 5 years do not think of death as the final stage of a life cycle. As of 6 years, they view death as an inescapable event without, however, understanding it as the result of a biological process. At this point, let us mention a cultural practice, story-telling, which also facilitates the learning and assimilation of unidirectional links between successive events. We know that small children, from about the age of 4, like to have stories told to them. They do not fail to complain if the story-teller does not respect the narrative order or omits an event. This ability to recognize the fixed order of a known narrative structure appears several years earlier than the ability to produce a complete, coherent story or to reconstruct the chronology of a new story. Discussing this question in a review of a number of authors, Fayol (1985) pointed out that while 4- and 5-year-old children are able to verbalize sequences of events, stories only take on an episodic structure for most children from the age of 8 onwards and the distinction between a narrative with canonical


structure and an incomplete story or a simple script does not become operative until the age of 9–10 years. Together with the idea of the irreversibility of change, another concept, more logical in nature, forms the indispensable ‘prerequisite’ for any diachronic approach. This is the idea of the constancy of identity through changes in time. If children do not recognize this conservation of identity then processes of transformation or evolution can have no meaning for them: they will witness nothing but a series of unconnected states. For example, a small child commenting on the first picture of a cartoon strip cries out ‘There’s Tintin!’ before looking at the second picture and shouting ‘Another Tintin!’. According to research conducted by Piaget and colleagues (Piaget, Sinclair and Bang, 1968), identity constancy appears only gradually. In one experiment, children were asked to draw the stages of growth of what appeared to them to be seaweed. In fact, the material was potassium ferrocyanide which acquires a treelike structure after a period of only a few minutes. The subjects were then asked to draw the stages of their own growth, from the infant to the adult state. Finally, they produced drawings illustrating the growth of the experimenter. When questioned, the 4-year-old children affirmed that identity was conserved throughout the series of drawings when these related to themselves, but not always when they related to the experimenter. These children refused to accept that the first set of drawings they had produced all represented the same seaweed. At the ages of 5 and 6, the children accepted the identity constancy of growing humans but not of the seaweed. It was not until the age of 7 that the majority of the children considered that the identity of the seaweed remained constant. Thus the idea of identity appears to be a fragile one in young children. Guardo and Bohan (1971, cited in Carey, 1985) found that only a very small percentage of 6-year-old children were prepared to state that they had always been the same girl or the same boy. Moreover, research conducted by DeVries (1969) and Keil (1989) shows that for 4- and 5-year-old children the idea of the identity of an animal is associated with its external appearance. It is not until the age of 9 that identity is considered to be dependent on birth and the internal organs. The knowledge which young children possess in connection with changes over time, knowledge which appears with the beginnings of representative activity and develops subsequently, can only exist if the precondition for a minimum structuring of temporal notions is satisfied. To reason in time implies the ability to understand time, at least in an elementary way. Despite the limited nature of the abilities of young children in this field and despite the difficulties they encounter in comparing durations and sequences in complex situations, they nevertheless possess an elementary form of knowledge concerning these temporal notions. Levin (1977, 1992) has shown that young children are capable of making correct temporal judgements, for example when required to judge the relative duration of the period of operation of two lamps. If the lamps are switched on one after the other and then turned off at the same time, these


young subjects know that one of them was lit for longer than the other. I have also defined certain early temporal ‘preliminary concepts’ (Montangero, 1977, 1985). ‘Before’, ‘after’ and ‘long’ are used appropriately when they relate to contents which are neither spatial nor kinematic, such as a period of waiting. Moreover, I have demonstrated the ability of 4- to 5-year-olds to link temporal orders, durations, speeds and distances of travel correctly, provided that their reasoning operates on only two terms at a time. For example ‘finish after’ implies ‘take longer than’ and ‘run faster’ implies ‘arrive before’ etc. It can be seen that at the age of 5, children already possess much of the knowledge that underlies diachronic thinking. They are interested in both the past and the future and are able to reconstruct or anticipate sequences of events, thanks in particular to their knowledge of the unidirectional links (deterministic, teleonomic, conventional, biological) between events. It is this knowledge set that enables them to re-establish the correct order of a series of pictures representing the progress of a simple event. They can, for example, establish the correct order of a set of pictures presented out of sequence, imagine the event that follows the last picture of a short ordered sequence or, albeit with greater difficulty, identify the event that precedes the first picture shown to them (Bonnens, 1990; French, 1989). Further important progress is made at around the age of 8. Thus two early pieces of research conducted by Piaget and his colleagues demonstrated that at this age the difficulties encountered by younger children in the understanding of narrative sequences begin to fade. This research involved tests originally published in 1911 by a Polish psychologist (Dawid) and subsequently standardized by Piaget’s colleagues. In the first test (Margairaz and Piaget, 1925), children were asked to deduce intermediate events from a presentation of the initial and final situations. For example: (1) a child holding a stick moves towards a dog; (2) the child is crying and his trousers are torn. The intermediate events were only deduced by a majority of subjects (75 per cent) at age 8 to 10 or even older depending on the story presented. Another of Dawid’s tests (Krafft and Piaget, 1925) consisted of presenting out of sequence four or five pictures telling a narrative story. It was only at age 7 that the children were able to reconstruct the chronological sequence of the simplest of the stories presented. Piaget’s qualitative analysis of the deficiencies which are overcome at this age emphasizes two factors which, in my opinion, explain the nature of diachronic thinking. First of all, this mode of thought consists of the ability to swim against the tide of impressions and ideas instead of following the irreversible current of consciousness. Second, and most importantly, the reconstruction of a narrative sequence presupposes the ability to perform a synthesis of a series of images. The progress which appears at about age 8 can also be observed in connection with temporal concepts and temporal reasoning. At this age, duration and temporal order are well differentiated, even in complex situations. For example, children accept that two moving objects which come to a halt at the same time may nevertheless have been in motion for differing lengths of time (if one of the


objects started moving before the other). They can also articulate more complex correspondences between time-related variables, a development which considerably improves temporal reasoning (Montangero, 1985; Piaget, 1969b). For example, when comparing the period of movement of two jumping dolls, one 8-year-old child said: ‘They moved for the same time [duration] because they left and arrived together [order], and the red doll made more jumps but her jumps were shorter than the blue doll’s jumps [work done in terms of discontinuous activity]. She moved more slowly towards the finish [speed] and that’s why she didn’t get as far [work done in terms of distance traveled].’ Furthermore, children start to acquire the conventional units of time such as days of the week, months etc. (Friedman, 1982). At the level of causal explanation, better adapted theories take the place of earlier explanations in terms of the powers with which objects are endowed or ‘egocentric’ explanations which view inanimate objects as living beings or physical phenomena as dependent on human activity (Piaget, 1972a, 1972b). A number of recent studies also reveal the advances made in the explanation of a variety of phenomena. For example, Inagaki and Hatano (1993) have found that when presented with a selection of explanations of biological phenomena, the majority of 8-year-old children choose those which appear most relevant to an adult (as against 20 per cent at age 6). Finally, Piaget and Inhelder (1971) observed significant progress in mental images (studied via the drawings produced or selected by the child) at age 8 to 9. Movements and transformations are correctly anticipated and reproduced at this stage of development (for example, the displacement of a square or the flattening of a wire cord forming a bow). Unanswered Questions Concerning the Nature and Development of the Diachronic Approach We have just seen that when children reach 8 to 9 years of age, they seem to possess all the capabilities required for the correct representation of changes over time. Does this mean that they are then capable of adopting a genuinely diachronic approach in which they associate a present state with the states which have preceded it or which will follow it, in which they can correctly imagine the transformations worked over time and in which they explain the present situation in part by reference to its past or future development? The vast body of literature devoted to the field of cognitive development provides us with no answer to this question. We know of no study to predate our own work in this field which has directly investigated the development of diachronic thinking in children. The first of the unanswered questions which we shall address in this current work is therefore: can children—at least when they have achieved an acceptable degree of skill in temporal reasoning, elementary logic, the causal explanation of a simple phenomenon and the usage


of the conventional units of time—consider things from a fully diachronic perspective? In answering this question, it is not possible to start from a precise definition of ‘a fully diachronic perspective’ and then determine whether the components of this perspective can be identified in 8- or 9-year-old children. This is because no such precise definition exists. In consequence, we have remained faithful to the established tradition of genetic epistemology and conducted a series of experiments with a dual objective. On the one hand, they are designed to reveal the fundamental components of the diachronic approach by means of an analysis of the difficulties encountered by children and the abilities which they gradually deploy in order to perfect their skills in this field, or more accurately, mode of knowledge. Given this orientation, the study of the behaviour of children of neighbouring age-groups does not necessarily form part of the discipline of child psychology. Instead it serves, within the perspective of cognitive psychology, to reveal the fundamental elements of knowledge. In consequence, these experiments have an exploratory character. They were not designed, at least initially, to test a hypothesis. On the other hand, this research is designed to reveal whether the mode of knowledge that interests us here develops and, if so, what form this development takes. First of all, this enables us to provide an answer to a general question of developmental psychology: is it possible to define degrees or levels of diachronic thinking? If the answer to this question is affirmative, then we shall take account of the most highly developed characteristics of the diachronic approach that we can identify in our subjects in our definition of the fundamental elements of this approach. Moreover, when viewed in terms of child psychology, the data relating to the diachronic approach will enable us to predict the type of ability that can be expected of 8- to 12-year-old subjects. These results may also be significant for the psychology of education. A number of things which are taught at school (in the sciences as well, perhaps, as in history or even computer science) presuppose the understanding or the adoption of a diachronic approach. How are we to understand children’s ability to assimilate such material if we know almost nothing about their intellectual development in this field? One important theoretical question concerning diachronic thinking remains totally unanswered: this is the question of whether it genuinely exists as a mode of thought distinct from the subject’s other competences. My basic hypothesis is that this is indeed a specific mode of thought, a way of apprehending reality. It might be argued that what I have termed diachronic thinking or a diachronic approach is simply the manifestation of a different competence. More specifically, might this diachronic approach simply be one aspect of temporal reasoning, or one of the characteristics of the causal explanation of evolutive phenomena or else a result of the ability to perform syntheses? To summarize, we can identify the following five questions concerning the mode of knowledge which we are discussing here:


1. What are the essential components of the diachronic approach that lead to the enhancement of knowledge? 2. Is it possible to define various levels of diachronic thinking? 3. Do children aged 8 and 9 already possess a developed diachronic perspective? 4. If such a perspective does develop between the ages of 8–9 and 11–12, what does this development consist of? 5. Is diachronic thinking a specific mode or does it form part of other aspects of knowledge, such as temporal reasoning, causal explanation or synthetic ability? In the conclusion to this work, I shall also ask why and how this development, which is revealed by the experimental results, progresses. To conclude this section, I should like to underline the epistemological problem that underlies this research and could already be glimpsed in the opening pages of this chapter. At the level of the epistemology of science, I am struck by the difficulty nowadays of identifying disciplines which explicitly claim allegiance to the diachronic approach. Nevertheless, this approach continues to make an important contribution to the advancement of science. However, I believe that it is above all at the level of everyday thinking that the richness and benefits of the diachronic approach have been all too frequently ignored. ‘Thinking in time’ and ‘explaining in time’ add a new dimension to our knowledge of beings and things. This is a complex mode of thought which is most certainly not immediately available in all its potential. It is therefore important to gain some insights into the stages of development of this competence.

Chapter 2 The Development of the Diachronic Approach in Children aged 7–8 to 11–12: Method and Population

Theoretical and Methodological Framework In my opinion, if we are to define a field or perspective of knowledge it is essential to focus on those aspects of reality that are meaningful for the subject. This formulation is not the expression of a naive realism: clearly it is the subjects who select particular aspects of reality and attribute meaning to them. These activities of abstraction and the attribution of meaning take place within a framework of interaction with real data which, of course, have a role to play in cognitive processes. Since we are interested in the aspects of reality which are meaningful for the subject, we shall clearly not be concentrating on the ‘hardware’ of human thought, that is to say the neurons and their functioning. Neither will this be a quantitative study measuring, for example, subjects’ attentional capacities (Halford, 1993; Pascual-Leone, 1987, etc.) as an indicator of the volume of information that can be processed simultaneously while ignoring the nature of this information. Similarly, we shall avoid an analysis in terms of general operations which can be applied to a variety of contents (as in certain passages by Piaget who, however, also analyzed the meanings attributed to the situations presented). In order to define the level of meaning that we intend to investigate here, let us summarize briefly the levels of knowledge which may constitute an object of study for psychologists interested in representations and their development. The most general level appears to relate to the scope of cognitive work (working memory or ‘processing resources’) which increases with development and leads to new possibilities for the acquisition of knowledge. Next comes the dataprocessing level which may be investigated either in terms of the most general mental operations or in a more specific manner. This is followed by the level of meaning, that is to say of concepts each of which is defined by a set of predicates and a network of relations which link these predicates and associate concepts with other concepts. Somewhat closer to the effective course of everyday thinking and cognitive adaptation are the levels of representational strategies (for example the use of prepositional or figurative processing) and problem-solving strategies which also comprise a monitoring function.


Our study of the level of meaning will be situated within the Piagetian or, more precisely, post-Piagetian research tradition. In many recent publications, the Piagetian perspective has been defined as the search for certain stages of development at which a particular form of reasoning is generalized to cover all contents (for example, Bennett, 1993; Sonuga-Barke and Webley, 1993). This interpretation does not correspond to Piaget’s theory whose principal aim was not the description of general stages but the search for organizational forms and functional processes which explain the nature of reasoning and its transformations during development (see Montangero and Maurice-Naville, 1994). Although inspired by Piaget, my own viewpoint differs from his in a number of questions. My own approach coincides with the Piagetian framework as it concerns the level of behaviour studied, a number of fundamental theoretical questions, and method. Knowledge is studied at the level of individual representations. Its study aims at the discovery of the shared forms and processes which underlie the construction of knowledge irrespective of the particularities of individual subjects. The theoretical perspective employed here is constructivist in nature and is based on the phenomenon of assimilation. What is of interest is neither the pool of innate processes nor a study orientated towards the effects of the environment, but rather the elaboration of forms of knowledge which account for the cognitive interaction between the subject and reality. I am convinced that it is only through their changing frameworks of knowledge that subjects ever know reality. As for the method, this consists of semi-directed interviews and an analysis of the results which is essentially qualitative in nature, moving from a comparison of responses obtained from children of a similar level to a comparison of the responses characteristic of contiguous age-groups. When response classes can be defined on the basis of a qualitative analysis, we then turn to the quantitative data relating to the frequency of these classes in each age-group. The proportion of subjects in a certain class is then expressed as a percentage which does not claim to be a precise indication of the proportion likely to be encountered in similar populations. These are indicative data which reveal whether a particular response type will be found in a majority or a minority of subjects in a given age-group and which make it possible to identify a potentially age-related development. What distinguishes this approach from the Piagetian perspective is, first, the absence of any precise description of structure or any analysis in logical terms and, second, the diminished importance attributed to the idea of stages. What is more, rather than studying the most general operations of thought, I am interested here in those aspects of reality which are of significance to the subject and the way in which they are coordinated. To this end, I have elaborated an analysis of temporal reasoning at the ‘infraoperational’ level (Montangero, 1985). In the current work, I shall not attempt to develop this definition of the systems and subsystems of meaning to the same extent since what we are concerned with here is the investigation of a new and rather more general field,

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DIACHRONIC APPROACH 15

namely a perspective of knowledge. My aim is to identify certain ‘schemes’ relating to temporality and change which are sufficiently general to be applied to a variety of contents. The development of this knowledge will be described in terms of the differentiation and coordination of the meanings involved. At the methodological level, my approach is characterized by a systematic comparison of children’s responses to questions on a single theme (namely changes over time) but relating to different contents. Moreover, a within-subject comparison of answers to different questions is sometimes performed. Even today, a Piagetian theoretical framework and methodology can provide a vital substrate for the study of knowledge. For example, Anna Emilia Berti has shown that in research aimed at determining children’s knowledge of economic topics, the study of subjects’ representations independently of their cultural representations and their actual behaviour can make an important contribution which a strictly socio-developmental perspective is incapable of yielding (see her commentary in Sonuga-Barke and Webley, 1993). Whatever the advantages of a post-Piagetian perspective, it cannot claim to solve all the problems associated with diachronic thinking and its development. If we take account of all the levels of knowledge we identified above it would be naive to expect the study of one of these levels (for our present purposes, the level of meaning) to free us from the necessity of studying the remaining levels. Similarly, the cognitive study of individual representations should, sooner or later, be complemented by the study of the other dimensions. Thus we are convinced that the work presented here will have to be complemented by studies undertaken by researchers working from different perspectives and, in particular, approaching the question from the standpoint of psychosocial and differential research and the study of the psychology of personality. Questions Asked and Tasks Set A dozen experiments were conducted in an attempt to find answers to the questions posed in the preceding chapter. While the experimental method changes slightly from one experiment to the next, a number of shared principles and aims were common to the entirety of this research. The main objective was to obtain data concerning the way children represent changes over time when dealing with evolutive phenomena. The term ‘evolutive phenomena’ is here used in its extended sense and applies to phenomena of growth and development, processes of decay, transformations of matter and changes due exclusively to human activity. In order to achieve this goal, it was important to make sure that the children’s spontaneous representations were not influenced by the premature presentation of depictions of the transformations which they were to be asked to complete or seriate. Therefore in the majority of these experiments, the subjects were presented with a situation which constituted an isolated state within a transformational process. The children were then asked to imagine and describe (either by means


of a drawing or verbally) the past stages of the presented situation or its future evolution. The depictions or verbalizations provided by the children then served as the starting point for a Piagetian-type interview. In such an interview, which is conducted individually, the same main questions are put to each child. However, it may also contain additional questions designed to induce the subjects to explain their responses. A first set of questions was posed in each experiment and was designed to extract from the children a verbalization of the changes which they had attempted to portray in their drawings or descriptions. For example this set of questions included ‘what changes in the tree when it grows?’, ‘what has changed in the tree between your first and second drawings?’, ‘and between the later drawings?’. Of interest also were the causes which the children cited for the imagined changes. The related questions were not asked with the aim of studying children’s causal explanations as an end in themselves. Instead, we wished to gain an understanding of their conception of change and see whether their explanations contained any reference to past events or future transformations. Finally, the subjects were asked a set of questions relating to the temporal parameters of the changes which they had portrayed or described. In particular, these questions were intended to reveal: • at what point they considered the transformations they had depicted to start and stop (for example, at what age does the ability to speak arise and when does it stop developing); • whether the changes take place at regular intervals or just at particular stages or times; • the time elapsed between the different depictions of successive states. This set of questions was posed in the majority of the experiments. A number of other tasks and techniques were introduced depending on the specific aim of the research. For example, in three experiments, pictures depicting successive stages of change were presented out of sequence during the interview. The subject’s task was to place these pictures in chronological order. The aim of this task was to study how children use cues to reconstruct the stages of a process of change. It involves a process of recognition, very different from the evocation of the transformations imagined by the child. This type of task usually enables us to determine the cues that are considered relevant in the reconstruction of development over time. Two of these experiments were designed essentially to study whether the application of a diachronic approach enhances the explanation and solution of a problem. To this end, the children were first asked to find an immediate answer to the problem with which they were confronted. They were then asked a series of questions which encouraged them to consider the situation from a diachronic viewpoint. In effect, these questions required them to reconstruct the past stages

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DIACHRONIC APPROACH 17

or predict the future stages of the presented phenomenon. Subsequently, the original question was posed again in order to determine whether the solutions that the children now put forward were different from or richer than their original solutions. Each child was interviewed individually. The interviews, which were conducted in a room devoted to this purpose and which lasted for approximately half an hour, were recorded and subsequently transcribed word for word. Variations in the Contents and Context of Knowledge The experiments which we have conducted into the development of the diachronic approach are more diverse than is suggested by the above description of their shared elements. First, a variety of methods were used to interest the children in the phenomenon or type of change that was being studied. Moreover, the fields of knowledge were systematically varied. This last point represents a fundamental principle of our research since we are interested in a generalizable form of knowledge rather than specific items of knowledge. We consequently varied the field of knowledge involved in order to determine whether certain common characteristics could be identified in the behaviours observed in the different experiments. Three of these fields related to the world of biology. They concerned trees and were associated with progressive evolutive processes (growth and ageing) and a potentially reversible process, namely decay through disease. The methods and results of these experiments will be presented in Chapter 3. Two more experiments were drawn from the physical domain. The first of these related to the transformation of matter, in this case the thawing of ice. The changes in the second case were not observable and concerned the origin and expansion of the universe. This research will be presented in Chapter 4. Another field of knowledge, which is dealt with in Chapter 5, concerns intuitive psychology.The study of this domain is conducted in order to comprehend the foundations of developmental psychology in the child. Although a number of current studies investigate children’s psychological knowledge in the form of the ‘theories of mind’ (Butterworth, Harris, Leslie, and Wellman, 1991; Perner, 1991) no developmental psychologist has so far shown an interest in the origins of this discipline as they are manifested in the child. This subject is naturally of interest to us since it is precisely the diachronic mode of thought that attempts to understand things in the course of development. It was therefore selfevident that we should question children about their conception of the development of cognitive abilities. The result was the performance of four experiments, described in Chapter 5, which related to the way children conceive of the development of drawing ability, verbal skills and intelligence. In the biological and physical fields, transformations are mainly due to natural processes. In contrast, psychological development is subject to both natural laws and human influence. We also conducted two experiments relating to changes in


domains which are exclusively influenced by human activity. One of these experiments made use of the evolution of economic status (poverty or wealth), whereas the other considered the problems of motorized transport. These two experiments are considered in Chapter 6. The Population Studied Different children were questioned in each of the experiments. We conducted individual interviews with a total of about 700 children undergoing normal schooling in the state schools of a Swiss city (Geneva). While the population we studied contained representatives of a number of nationalities, the majority (approximately 70 per cent) were Swiss. Most of the children came from middleclass families although a small number were drawn from higher or lower levels of the socio-professional hierarchy. In nine of the experiments, the age-groups studied were contiguous (one agegroup per school year). This distribution of subjects made it possible to trace all the principal stages in the development of knowledge, an advantage which is not always available when more widely spaced age-groups are investigated. It is necessary to provide an explanation for the choice of the principal age range treated in our research which extends from 7–8 years to 11–12 years. As stated in the first chapter, our aim was not the study of the knowledge of time but rather the study of the use of time in knowledge. We therefore wish to avoid being in a position in which we would be unable to differentiate between those aspects of the responses obtained which result from a lack of temporal knowledge and those which are due to an insufficiently developed diachronic approach. For this reason, the youngest age-group studied, which usually consists of children aged 8 to 9, had already reached a level of cognitive development at which they possess the well-differentiated intellectual tools necessary for reasoning in time (Montangero, 1985; Piaget, 1969b). By selecting children of 8 years or more as the youngest to be interviewed in the majority of our experiments we have exposed ourselves to the risk of a ceiling effect. It might perhaps be expected that children who, in a number of fields, have attained the level of concrete operations would be able to produce an accurate representation of changes over time and would exhibit only a very limited development in their diachronic approach up to the age of 11. Our research has shown us that this is far from being the case. As we shall see, the age range studied is of considerable interest for the analysis of the development of diachronic thinking.

Chapter 3 The Evolution of Conceptions of Biological Transformations (the Growth and Decay of Trees)

Draw me a Growing Tree: from Change of Size to Morphological Transformation

Objectives and Problems Of the changes that occur in time, there is one that is particularly relevant to children, namely the phenomenon of growth. While children are, of course, most interested in human growth they are far from indifferent to the question of plant growth. Having learned, as early as kindergarten, that a seed will turn into a shoot or, at least in the case of children who have some experience of nature, that a flower grows, blossoms and then withers or that the grass gets longer, young children know perfectly well that the concept of growth can be applied to plant life. We have decided to study children’s representations of the growth of a tree not simply because this concept is familiar to them but also because it is a process which is not difficult to represent graphically. In the first of the experiments to be presented here it permitted us to reduce verbal elements to a minimum. The aim of this research was to see whether the conception of the growth of a tree changes over the age range under consideration. Clearly, there is a development in the drawing technique: between the ages of 7–8 and 11–12 delineation becomes more precise, shapes become more realistic and an increased number of details can be drawn. In contrast, at the level of children’s conceptions of growth, it may well be that no major transformation is observed between these ages since the external manifestations of this phenomenon are relatively simple to grasp. As far as animal growth is concerned, Gelman (1993) has shown that from the age of 3 onwards, children know that size increases with growth and that at 6 they also expect to observe an increase in the complexity of form. It might therefore be supposed that children of 7–8 years of age are already familiar with


the characteristics of tree growth. If this is so then any progress observed between the ages of 7 and 12 should therefore be quantitative in nature and be reflected in more pictures or a greater amount of detail portrayed. However, I concur with the results obtained by Carey which point to a clear evolution of biological concepts up to the age of 10 (see Carey, 1985) and reject this hypothesis. Instead, I postulate that the child’s conception of growth may indeed change between the ages of 7 and 12. What prompts me to advance this hypothesis is the great complexity of diachronic thinking together with the fact that cognitive abilities undergo considerable progress during this period. The second aim of this research was to study the relationship between temporal knowledge and diachronic thinking. There can be no doubt that we are dealing here with two distinct forms of knowledge. For example, to establish a correspondence between the date or age of the states of a transformation and the total duration of the evolutive phenomenon is a simple question of temporal reasoning. In contrast, the ability to associate a present state with a past state or possess a particular conception of transformations which occur over time does not form part of this reasoning. Instead, it is an attribute of diachronic thinking. The two types of knowledge are combined at the point where the subject needs to establish the precise duration of an evolutive phenomenon. In such a case, the subject must not only be able to conceptualize this evolution (diachronic thinking) but also be in a position to measure it using temporal units (temporal reasoning). Given that in certain cases it is possible, and indeed necessary, to fuse diachronic thinking and temporal reasoning, it seems to me to be important to observe the relations which may obtain between these two types of competence. Tasks and Population An initial experiment, designed and conducted by Dionnet, made it possible to enumerate the behaviours which are of interest in connection with the question of tree growth. This experiment has been reproduced by Pons and Scheidegger with the twin aim of verifying and quantifying certain results and of studying the correlation between this behaviour and responses concerning another evolutive phenomenon. The procedure of the first experiment was as follows. Drawings of the stages of growth of a tree By way of an introduction, the subject was first shown an accelerated video depicting flowers opening. The children were then asked to draw ‘how a flower opens’ and to produce as many drawings as necessary to make it quite clear how flowers open. The experimenter then asked whether ‘it’s the same when trees grow’. Since the response to this question was negative in every case, the children were asked to produce ‘drawings that show just how a tree grows’.

THE EVOLUTION OF CONCEPTIONS OF BIOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 21

This task therefore required the subjects to imagine a growth process which children aged between 7 and 12 have never seen unfold for any one tree. At most, they might be able to reconstruct the development of a tree on the basis of observations of various stages of growth each of which concerns a different example (trees or shrubs of differing sizes). In this experiment the children’s knowledge was presented in the form of drawings and they were not called upon to verbalize their conceptions. Since Luquet’s work in 1913, we have known that children’s drawings do not simply represent what they see but also what they know. Thus the drawings produced in this experiment reflected not only the observable characteristics of trees and pictures of trees but also what the subjects knew, or thought they knew, about the growth of trees. Questions concerning the temporal parameters The second set of questions posed to the subjects of this experiment related to the temporal parameters associated with tree growth. On the one hand, the children were asked to estimate the total period of growth which they had depicted (‘how much time has passed between what is shown in the first picture and the last picture?’). On the other, they were asked to state the age of the tree that was depicted in each drawing in the series. The aim of this set of questions was to study the relation between children’s conceptions of evolutive phenomena and their temporal knowledge and reasoning. Such temporal knowledge may be further divided into two aspects: first, there is the empirical aspect, that is to say data acquired concerning the duration of tree growth and, second, there is the aspect of deduction or coherence which can be observed in the relationship between the total duration of the phenomenon and the age attributed to each of the depicted trees. The nature of growth The third point studied in this experiment related to the spatial characteristics of growth. In order to determine whether children think of growth as a cumulative or distributed phenomenon, the experimenter drew a cross half-way up the trunk of the first tree drawn by the child. The subject was then asked to indicate the position of this cross in the subsequent drawings which represented more advanced stages of growth. If children considered growth to be cumulative, the cross would not remain half-way up the trunk since this would be thought to continue growing above (or below) the point marked by the cross. In contrast, if growth was considered to be distributed, the cross would be expected to remain half-way up the trunk. In reality, it appears that tree growth is cumulative. However, our aim was not to test whether children were budding botanists but to determine whether or not they were able (based on the model of human and animal growth) to think in


terms of distributed development which affects the entirety of the segment under consideration. Population It comprised 80 children aged between 7 and 11 (16 per age-group). Second experiment This experiment followed the procedure of the first experiment with the following modifications. The subjects were not shown the film of the flower opening but were instead immediately asked to draw a tree. They were then told: ‘Draw me as many pictures as you need to show me what happened before and then after your drawing.’ Moreover the third part of the procedure (nature of growth) was suppressed. In this experimental variant, the subjects were also asked about the causes of growth. The population comprised 60 subjects. In order to verify the results obtained in the first experiment a group of children of a mean age of 9 years was compared with a group of mean age 12 years (15 children per group). Furthermore, to see whether the developmental trends which were observed became more fully established after the age of 12, a group of adolescents (15 subjects) and a group of adults (15 subjects) were also interviewed. For reasons beyond our control, these last two groups had to be interviewed collectively using a paper-and-pencil questionnaire. Thus any comparison with 9- and 12-year-old groups is purely indicative. The age ranges and mean ages are as follows: 9 years (from 8:6 to 9:5, M=8:10), 12 years (from 11:6 to 12:5, M= 11:10), 14–15 years (from 14:1 to 14: 11, M=14:8) and adults (from 24 to 32 years, M=24:3). Results Depiction of changes As might have been expected, all the subjects tested depicted growth-related changes in the appearance of the tree. The mean number of drawings representing different stages in the growth of a tree has no discriminant validity (the mean number of drawings varied between five and six depending on age). Of far greater interest were the changes depicted by the children in their drawings. The number of changes depicted grew very significantly with age: in the second experiment (involving age groups of 9, 12, 15 and 24 years), the mean number of changes varied between 0.9 and 3 depending on age and an analysis of variance (one-way) yields highly significant results (F=13.97, p< 0. 001).


The changes depicted concerned the size and thickness of the tree, the number of branches and leaves, the presence of a crown (simply added as a circle) or the transformation of the shape of the tree. Moreover, some of the drawings did not depict a standing tree but rather a seed, a shrub, a felled tree etc. In the drawings of the 12-year-olds it was frequently possible to observe the depiction of people tending the tree. An analysis of the nature of the depicted changes shows that constancy or variation in the shape of the tree was the clearest indication of development in the conception of growth. We grouped the drawings into four categories (see figure 3.1 a, b, c, d): (1) constant shape (absence of morphological change; the dimensions simply increased progressively); (2) minor changes in shape (either the shape of the tree itself remained constant, as in (1), but was preceded by a different shape—for example, that of a seed—to depict the tree’s origin, or the shapes of the tree remained very similar and were differentiated only by the addition of a circle to depict the crown or by additional branches which did not modify the general aspect of the tree); (3) different and identical shapes (at least three different shapes while many successive drawings possessed an identical shape as in (1)); (4) shapes all different (one shape per drawing). In the first experiment, most of the youngest subjects (62 per cent of 7-yearolds) depicted type 1 growth which consisted exclusively of an increase in the size of the tree. The shape remained identical in all the drawings while growth was indicated by the inflation of this shape (see figure 3.1 a). At the age of 8, half of the children still produced this type of drawing. In contrast, 75–80 per cent of the 10- and 11-year-old subjects depicted clear morphological changes during growth (see figure 3.1 d). If the four types of drawing are combined to produce two general categories: (I) identical or closely related shapes (types 1 and 2); (II) varied shapes (types 3 and 4), then we find that a majority of subjects can be placed in category II from the age of 10 onwards. In the second experiment, in which the youngest subjects were 9 years old, there were almost no type 1 drawings (one drawing only at age 9 and age 12). Table 3.1 presents the distribution of the subjects in the four age-groups over the two categories which we have formed from the four types of drawing. It can be seen that two-thirds of the 9-year-old children are placed in category I, whereas the majority of the 12-year-old subjects (12 out of 15, or 80 per cent) produced category II drawings. Six of these subjects produced type 4 drawings (one shape per drawing), while none of the 9-year-olds produced this type of response. These results, which are in agreement with the experimental data which we shall present in the following chapters, draw our attention to the importance of the representation of qualitative changes (different shapes or structures) from a certain level of development onwards. This can be contrasted with the more quantitative conception of change that is observed in children aged 7 to 9. When we turn to children’s global conception of growth, we are able to identify two general types. On the one hand, there was gradual, linear evolution progressing from a beginning to an end and, on the other, we observed a cyclical


Figure3.1: Tree growth Examples of series of drawings: (a) constant shape, (b) minor changes in shape, (c) different and identical shapes, (d) shapes all different


Table 3.1: Categories of drawings. Percentage of subjects per age-group (N=15 subjects per group) and category

conception of development. In this latter conception, the old tree produces seeds which form the starting point for growth identical to that depicted in the first set of drawings. It is linear evolution that we found depicted most frequently in subjects up to the age of 15. The spontaneous representation of cyclical growth was very rare in 9-year-olds (13 per cent of subjects) and increased notably with age (40 per cent at age 12, 46 per cent in adolescents and 66 per cent in adults). Temporal parameters A study of the temporal parameters which children attributed to the stages of tree growth revealed a change in their conception of the total duration of the phenomenon. The majority of 9-year-old subjects (87 per cent) believed that this duration was less than 10 years. Amongst the 12-year-olds, however, the estimated duration was considerably longer: 11 children out of 15 (73 per cent) thought that the process extended over a number of decades, generally taking about 100 years. The most striking characteristic of these estimates concerned the age attributed to each of the trees in the series of drawings. The first experiment revealed that most 7-year-old children believed that there was a fixed interval between the various stages of growth (for example, the trees in successive drawings were considered to be 1 year old, 2 years old, 3 years old etc.). In the second experiment it can be seen that two-thirds of the 9-year-old subjects still believed that there was a fixed interval between the stages of growth. This type of evaluation had disappeared completely in the 12-year-old group. A study of the relationship between the ages attributed to the trees and the total period of growth revealed that there was still no correspondence between these two types of evaluation at the age of 9. Most of the children (87 per cent) estimated ages which did not correspond to the duration of growth. For example one subject stated that ‘it took ten years’ from the first to last drawings of the sequence. However, he also thought that the tree in the first drawing was 2 years old whereas that in the final drawing was 4 years old. Another child stated that seven years had passed between the first and last drawings and that each of the trees depicted on the nine drawings had gained one year, the first being two years


Table 3.2: Correspondence between temporal estimates. Percentage of subjects per agegroup (N=15 subjects per group) whose estimation of the age of drawn trees corresponds or not with the total duration of growth

old and the final one 10 years old. Three of the 15 adult subjects also made similar mistakes. As Table 3.2 shows, only a minority of 12-year-olds failed to establish a correspondence between age and total duration. Correspondence increased with age, the greatest progress being made between the ages of 9 and 12. Drawing the cross When we turn to the cumulative or distributed nature of growth, we find that the first of these conceptions predominated in all the age-groups studied in the first experiment. However, from the age of 9 onwards, a minority of subjects thought that the cross would remain half-way up the trunk. This belief may derive from a distributed conception of growth (the subject believed that each part of the segment grows). However, this behaviour may also be indicative of the primacy of the idea of the middle and imply no kinematic representation of changes in time. Summary and Conclusion It is clear that this initial research does not enable us to draw any general conclusions concerning the development of the diachronic approach. However, it does demonstrate that children’s conception of a simple evolutive phenomenon, such as the growth of a tree, changes between the ages of 7–8 and 11–12. A new way of conceptualizing this phenomenon makes its appearance at age 10 and becomes established one year later. What evolves with the age of the subjects is the variety and nature of the changes they depict. Young children, primarily at age 7 but also sometimes up to the age of 9, imagine that a single aspect—or a very restricted number of aspects —changes with time. In contrast, children aged 11 or 12 imagine that a whole set of transformations take place in the course of time. The criterion of development


which I propose observing in order to trace this evolution relates to the morphological changes involved in tree growth. It seems to me that what is important for development is not the variety and complexity of the depicted shapes but the tendency, when asked to represent the growth of a tree, to depict a different shape in each drawing. By the end of this evolution, children depict growth as a series of distinct steps. In other words, they represent the stages of this evolutive phenomenon. Younger children depict particular moments in the modification of one or two dimensions. These initial results enable us to formulate a hypothesis which we will have to test in other domains: the development of diachronic thinking is characterized by the ability to imagine qualitative changes in time which complement the essentially quantitative changes depicted by children aged 7 to 9. When we turn to the temporal parameters which children attribute to the stages of growth of a tree, we observe that the total estimated duration of the evolutive phenomenon increases with the age of the subjects. There is nothing surprising in this. Since the 12-year-old children have lived longer than the younger subjects, they have learned to think in terms of longer periods and are more likely to have discovered that trees live for a long time. However, in my opinion, this does not explain the very substantial difference in the estimates obtained from the 9- and 12-year-old groups. The 9-year-old subjects imagine a period of growth on the scale of their own lifetimes (less than 10 years). However, by the age of 12, children are quite capable of imagining a growth process which extends over a temporal scale which bears no relation to their own lives (100 years). This is clearly more than a simple quantitative increase. This research has shown us that the majority of 7-year-old children (and, indeed, one-third of 9-year-olds) tend to imagine that there is a fixed interval between the stages representing an evolutive process. For the moment we shall simply note the presence of this inflexibility in the attribution of dates and the duration of the stages of the growth process. We must wait to see whether this type of behaviour is observed in connection with other evolutive phenomena before attempting to analyze it and evaluate the implications. Another noteworthy result obtained among the 9-year-olds and younger subjects is the lack of correspondence between the ages attributed to the tree at each stage of growth and the overall estimated duration of the growth process. It might be thought that at the age of 9 mental arithmetic is not sufficiently automated to permit the spontaneous monitoring of the correspondence between the different values estimated by the child. However, is this really an adequate explanation when the values to be compared are as low and as divergent as in the two examples cited above? Whatever the answer, it is clear that children at the start of the concrete operational stage (between 7 and 9) do not apply the instruments of knowledge which they are able to manipulate (calculation in the arithmetical field, the association of sequences and durations in the field of temporal reasoning) to their spontaneous representations of evolutive phenomena. Children do not make the effort to establish a correspondence


between their temporal evaluations and, from the conceptual viewpoint, they do not necessarily relate the idea of age to that of duration of existence. To conclude, let us return to a result which relates to the general conception of growth. This is the tendency which children display to conceive of growth as a linear phenomenon with a beginning and an end, whereas it can also be thought of as a cyclical process. Drawings of the stages in the life of a tree which progress from a seed to the mature state simply isolate a sequence within this cycle: on reaching maturity, the tree produces seeds which are the starting point in the life of a new tree. It is clear that 9-year-old children are familiar with the idea of plant reproductive cycles. They should therefore be capable of recognizing the representation of a cycle and of producing such a representation on request. Here we see the gulf which can divide recognitive knowledge, or knowledge which can be activated on request, from spontaneously evoked knowledge. This type of spontaneous evocation occurs more frequently in the 12year-old subjects (40 per cent compared with 13 per cent among the 9-yearolds). However, it is only in the adult group that it can be observed in a majority of subjects. It would appear that humans must think of themselves as physically and socially capable of having children before they think of life as a cyclical process. The Past and Future of a Diseased Tree: from External Discontinuous Changes to Progressive Internally Generated Transformations Objectives and Problems Not all changes in time take the form of a process of progress or growth. In the biological as in other fields, change may follow the path of decay. Similarly, some changes in time are, unlike growth, not irreversible. In order to study children’s representations of these negative and reversible changes, Maurice-Naville designed an experiment concerning spruce disease (Maurice-Naville and Montangero, 1992). The subject of forest disease made a deep impact on public consciousness during the 1980s, particularly in certain European countries such as Germany and Switzerland. Throughout history, the forest has been an object of respect, as much for its value to man as for its symbolic connotations. A mythical place providing shelter for fairies and elves, Sleeping Beauty’s castle and a hideaway for the outlawed hero, the forest is also a source of valuable raw materials coveted by craftsmen and industrialists alike. While aesthetes admire its beauty, the forest is for many people the embodiment of the dynamism and integrity of nature. And this is not to mention its role in maintaining the climatic balance of the planet. It is easy to understand the shock felt by ecologists on learning from


expert observers that the health of our forests is in decline, probably as a result of air pollution. A number of studies have investigated children’s representations of human disease. While certain authors have revealed a qualitative change in the evolution of such explanations during the course of children’s cognitive development (for example Bibace and Walsh, 1981; Del Barrio Martinez, 1990), Eiser, Eiser, Lang and Mattack (1990) cast doubt on the existence of such a qualitative difference and assert that young children already possess a good understanding of disease. According to these authors, the explanations provided by young children are not very different from those produced by adults. In our study, we were concerned with any age-related changes in children’s conceptions of spruce disease. What interests us here is not the study of the explanation of biological phenomena per se. Instead, the object of our investigation was the correlation between the explanation of the disease and the degree of development of diachronic thinking in the child. If the hypothesis proposed in the first chapter is correct, then the explanation of an evolutive phenomenon should improve as diachronic thinking develops. We therefore expected that between the ages of 8 and 11, the development of children’s explanations of spruce disease would mirror that of the diachronic aspects of the representations of this disease. The primary objective of this experiment was thus to study certain aspects of the diachronic approach which could not be observed in the preceding research, as well as to confirm or deny the general validity of the results obtained during the course of this research. In attempting to identify the development of diachronic thinking, the study of children’s conceptions of spruce disease allows us to investigate two fundamental questions. The first concerns the nature of the links between successive stages of an evolutive process. Are these links as strong and necessary in the representations of the younger subjects as they are in those of their older colleagues? This problem of the connections introduced between the stages of an evolutive phenomenon is of crucial importance for our understanding of the diachronic approach. Indeed, this approach can be defined as the ability to establish links between a current situation and the stages which precede or follow it. The second question concerns the relationship between past and future changes. Do children consider such changes to be similar or dissimilar in nature? As far as temporal measurements and temporal logic are concerned, there is no reason to distinguish between the intervals or sequences which occurred in the past and those which may occur in the future. However, Fraisse (1963) and Harner (1982) have emphasized the asymmetry between past and future which exists in both the temporal estimation and the language of young children. Moreover, it is essential that the past, present and future modes are distinguished in a conceptualization of time which involves diachronic thinking. Is this a purely semantic distinction, a type of label which can be attributed to each successive state, or does it affect the way the data are processed (in other words,


the way these states are linked)? This question is as yet unanswered and necessitates a comparison of the representations of past and future changes. This new experiment also examines two points relating to the verification of the results obtained in our study of the representations of tree growth. First, it is necessary to determine whether the representations of changes develop as clearly and at similar ages between 8 and 11 when these concern a process of decay. Second, we wanted to investigate whether the tendency of young subjects to imagine fixed intervals between successive states is also observed in connection with the stages of a disease. Questions and Population Drawings of past and future states After a familiarization phase (verbal exchange about the forest and about healthy and diseased trees), the subject was shown a photograph of a diseased spruce tree and asked: ‘Does this tree look all right or is there something wrong with it? Do you think it has always looked like that?’ The child was then asked to draw the tree as it was before and to draw as many pictures as necessary to make clear what had happened to the tree. When the drawings of past states were completed, the experimenter pointed to the photo of the diseased tree (which was at the end of the series of drawings) and asked whether the tree would always look like that. If the answer was negative, the experimenter said: ‘Now draw what is going to happen to the tree.’ ‘And then?’ ‘And then?’ Children’s comments The child had to answer the following question: ‘Can you explain to me what is the meaning of your drawings?’ Since the method of interview was semidirected, other questions could be asked, so that the children could specify what they meant. Seriation Five photos showing successive states of the tree disease (from the initial healthy state to the state of dead tree) were shown in random order. The children were asked to put them in the right order. They were then requested to explain why and how they had proceeded to seriate the pictures and to say what was represented on each photo and what changed from one picture to the following one.


Questions about temporal parameters ‘How much time has passed between the first photo and the last one?’ ‘Is there the same amount of time between each photo, or does it vary?’ Reversibility ‘Is it possible to tell the story in the other direction, to tell what happened starting from the last picture?’ ‘Can we reverse the order of the photos?’ Explanation of the disease If this explanation was not given spontaneously, the child was asked about the causes of the disease and the possibility of contamination. Population The population comprised 52 children divided into four age-groups of 13 subjects each: 8 years (8:1 to 8:10, M=8:5), 9 years (9:0 to 9:11, M=9:6), 10 years (10:1 to 10:10, M=10:6) and 11 years (11:1 to 11:10, M=11:6). Results We will first deal with the conceptions of the transformations due to the disease, which can be divided into three categories of answers. Then we will consider the results concerning the answers to the questions about temporal parameters. Lastly the explanations of the disease (answers to the questions about its causes) will be presented. Conceptions of transformations We have considered the different answers given by each child concerning the number, the form and the continuity of the transformations due to the disease. The set of answers can be classified into three categories each of which corresponds to a distinct level of development. Level I is characterized by the representation of discontinuous states. In level II answers, changes are gradual and external and in level III subjects depict changes that are also gradual but with a continuity introduced between states thanks to the reference to an internal process. Table 3.3 shows the proportion of subjects of each level by age-group. At the age of 8 years, the majority of subjects fell within level I, at 9 they were divided almost equally between levels I and II and at the age of 10 between levels II and III. The majority of 11-year-olds gave sets of answers of level III.


Table 3.3: Pine tree disease. Percentage of subjects per age-group (N = 13 subjects per group) and per level of representation of changes due to disease

In level I responses, there were few drawings depicting the evolution of the disease and there was no link between them. Each child produced two to three drawings, with a maximum of one drawing showing what was going to happen in the future. In these drawings and in comments made about them changes appeared to be sudden. When the future was represented, it obeyed a different law of evolution than the past. In some subjects (5 out of 17) the drawings revealed a confusion between the progression of the disease and the passage of the seasons. Here are a few examples which illustrate this category of answers. Child aged 8:9 (see figure 3.2 a). This subject produced one drawing only. ‘First some leaves. Here [showing the photo of the diseased tree] they have nearly all fallen off.’ The child was asked whether the tree would always remain like this. She answered affirmatively. Child aged 8:3 (figure 3.2 b). The subject produced one drawing for the past and one for the future. ‘Here [past] there were more leaves than now, the tree was younger. There [future] the wind is going to blow its leaves off.’ Child aged 8:6 (see figure 3.2 c). The subject drew one picture for the past and one for the future. ‘Here [past] it was small. Here [photo] it does not have any leaves because it is autumn…it is sick, because it is losing its leaves. Here [future] it looks nice because it is summer.’ This is a clear example of lack of differentiation between multiple processes of change over time. The child represented both the growth (increase of height) and the change of seasons although he was requested to depict the evolution of the disease. As far as the sedation of the five photos was concerned, it was correctly executed by the majority of subjects, from this age onwards. These children had no difficulty in reconstructing a series of states which follow one another chronologically. What they lacked was the spontaneous representation of a differentiated evolutive process constituted by gradual changes. When asked questions about the reversibility, most of these children accepted the idea that the story can be told from right to left as well as from left to right. This was however a case of pseudo-reversibility, since the process of change was thought to be different in each direction. For example, in one direction ageing was mentioned: ‘This one is young. Now it is older. Still older.’ In the other direction, the same subject referred to a regenerating process due to the change


Figure 3.2: Examples of drawings of level I representing the stages of disease of a tree Source. Reproduced from Maurice-Naville, D. and Montangero, J. (1992) The development of diachronic thinking: 8–12-year-old children’s understanding of the evolution of forest disease, British Journal of Developmental Pyschology, 10, 365–83, with kind permission of The British Psychological Society, London, UK.


of season: ‘There [drawing of a dead tree] there is something wrong. Here it is better because it is summer. Here it is in good health.’ At level II, characterized by external gradual transformations, more drawings were produced (mean of five drawings per child) and they depicted a more progressive change (the gradual falling off of leaves), with intermediate states between the states drawn by level I children. Verbal descriptions often comprised expressions indicating the progressive aspect of changes: ‘It is beginning to, there are some more, it becomes more and more.’ At this level, children ceased to mix growth and disease in their representations of successive states. Half of the children of this level anticipated only one future outcome whereas the other half mentioned successively two possibilities. For example, they drew a progressive decay until the death of the tree. Then they said they could draw another series of pictures for the future and they depicted a regeneration of the tree resulting from some form of human intervention. Here are examples of the different subcategories. Child aged 9:6 (figure 3.3 a): ‘At the beginning [first drawing], there were a few more leaves and each time [following drawings and photo] it lost a few more.’ For the drawing of the future state: ‘These branches are beginning to go yellow and the bark will become dry.’ Child aged 10:9 (figure 3.3 b): ‘[First drawing] There were lots of branches at the top and lower down as well. [Second drawing] I will put fewer branches and the lower part will start to go bare. [Photo] It is a diseased tree. [Drawing 3] It is going to get worse, it is beginning to lose its needles higher up as well, the roots are starting to be damaged by insects. [Drawing 4] It is going to die. Then the subject proposes another outcome [Drawing 5]. We could try and make it better, maybe cut the trunk. [Drawing 6] It is beginning to grow again.’ As far as the question about reversibility was concerned, only a minority of subjects at this level accepted that the story could be told from right to left and imagined that some human intervention would put an end to the disease. At level III the transformations were conceived as continuous and due to an internal process. The states of the disease drawn became more numerous (mean of 11 per child). Sometimes the internal process was only vaguely alluded to: the disease or dryness spreads into the tree. Here is an example (child aged 11:2, figure 3.4): ‘[1] It is healthy. [2] Then it becomes a popular place for tourists. People come and throw things, for example banana skins. There are gaps in the vegetation. [3] There are more and more gaps in the forest. It is polluted; more and more people pass by. [4 (Photo and next drawing)]. They are more and more diseased. [5] Here it is completely bare, it is beginning to go dry and die. [6] There it is rotten.’ More often children of this level explicitly referred to what was supposed to take place within the tree. For example, one subject said: ‘The water gets polluted and then it gets into the roots, it rises with the sap, it’s spread everywhere, the tree cannot get proper nourishment any more, it is weakened, it has less and less resistance.’


Figure 3.3: Examples of drawings of level II representing the stages of disease of a tree Source: Reproduced from Maurice-Naville, D. and Montangero, J. (1992) The development of diachronic thinking: 8–12-year-old children’s understanding of the evolution of forest disease, British Journal of Developmental Pyschology, 10, 365–83, with kind permission of The British Psychological Society, London, UK.

As far as the future was concerned, several possibilities were mentioned by each subject. One child said, for example: ‘It depends whether the tree is strong enough to resist and it also depends on the season and on the type of soil.’ Another asserted: ‘Either it will become worse and worse and it will die or it is strong enough to resist and it will get healthy again, or else it will stay like this [with some branches without needles] for the rest of its life.’ Since they were able to imagine several possible outcomes, the children of this level accepted the idea that the evolution can also be described from right to left (reversibility of transformations). Temporal parameters Let us now consider the answers concerning the time that elapses between the successive states depicted. At level I, half the children thought that the interval between each picture was constant. As of level II, subjects imagined that the evolution had an irregular rhythm. Practically all of them thought that the interval between the final stages of the disease would be shorter than the duration between the initial states: they imagined an acceleration of the process of decay. Some level III subjects thought that different rhythms were possible, as a function of the age of the tree, of the climate, etc.


Figure 3.4: Examples of drawings of level III representing the stages of disease of a tree Source. Reproduced from Maurice-Naville, D. and Montangero, J. (1992) The development of diachronic thinking: 8–12-year-old children’s understanding of the evolution of forest disease, British Journal of Developmental Pyschology, 10, 365–83, with kind permission of The British Psychological Society, London, UK.

Explanations The diverse explanations given to account for the spruce tree disease can be divided into two categories which correspond to two developmental levels. In the first category, the cause of the disease is punctual and most often due to a human intervention. For example: ‘One day people passed by and threw rubbish near the tree. It gave it the disease.’ At this level, explanations referred to one cause only and tended to confuse the disease with other processes of transformation such as ageing or the course of seasons. When asked: ‘Are the disease and the course of the seasons one and the same thing or are they different?’ they often answered: ‘It is more or less the same thing, because they lose their needles in winter and also when they are diseased.’ In the second category (and second level) of explanation, the disease was presented as an internal biological process which developed gradually. There were no more confusions between the disease and other evolutive processes. An important characteristic of the explanations of this level was their multicausal nature. Each subject mentioned several causes from the following factors: pollution due to car fumes, climatic conditions, nature of the soil and biological factors such as the age or the degree of resistance of the tree. There is some intersection between our definitions of the levels of development of diachrony, on the one hand, and of explanations on the other. Both level III of diachronic thinking and level II of explanation comprise a


Table 3.4: Comparison of levels of diachronic thinking and explanation in 10- and 11year-old children (N=26)

gradual and internal conception of the disease. However, the main criterion for allocating the subjects to one or other of the levels of explanation was the multicausal aspect of their answers. This criterion is a priori unrelated to changes over time. We have checked whether there was a high level of correlation between levels of diachrony and explanation. The analysis was conducted using the answers of 10- and 11-year-old subjects, who had received comparable information at school concerning biological phenomena. Table 3.4 reveals a perfect correlation between the levels of diachrony and of explanation. Out of 26 subjects aged 10 and 11, only 10 were still at an intermediate level of diachronic thinking (level II). These 10 subjects were precisely those who did not give multicausal explanations and who were consequently at level I of explanation. The remaining 16 subjects were at the upper level both for diachrony and explanation. Summary and Conclusion This experiment shows that the way a sequence of reversible changes leading to decay is represented develops in parallel to the representation of growth, that is, of a sequence of irreversible changes taking the form of an increase or progress. In both cases, 11-year-old children’s graphical or verbal descriptions contrast with those of 8- and 9-year-old subjects and a transition between these two levels is observed at the age of 10. We have identified three levels in the representations of changes due to the disease. At the first level, changes are discontinuous, at the second they are gradual and external and at the third level gradual changes are explained by an internal process. What differentiates these levels is, first, the varied nature of the representation of the stages in the process (and therefore the number of drawings produced), second the link introduced between the steps and third the internal or external nature of the changes envisaged by the child. The temporal parameters of the phenomenon, its possible reversibility and the causes mentioned also vary as a function of the children’s developmental level. The majority of 8-year-olds and half of the 9-year-olds were at level I. Level II could be observed in the other


half of the 9-year-olds and in 54 per cent of the children aged 10. The remaining 10-year-olds and the majority of 11-year-olds were situated at level III. In the following summary of the results, we shall recall the characteristics of the extreme levels (I and III) for each aspect that we have considered. As far as the richness of the representation of changes and the links between steps are concerned, the drawings and verbal comments of level I children revealed a striking absence of continuity in the changes. The children imagined a limited number of changes and conceived of sudden transformations at the beginning of the process (a punctual cause provoking the disease) or later on (for example, all the needles were supposed to fall off at once). There was no continuity between past and future and the latter, when represented, was reduced to one state only. At level III, there was first significant increase in the number of steps depicted. Furthermore, the links between steps were much more evident: changes were gradual and some internal process was thought to connect the successive states. A given state could be explained by what had happened before, since the state of the tree was viewed as the result of the spread of microbes or ‘pollution’ that had appeared during the preceding state. The disease was thus seen as a single process, well differentiated from other evolutive phenomena, in contrast with what occurred at level I. Indeed younger children did not differentiate clearly between growth, disease and changes due to the seasons. In the evolution they depicted, these different forms of change could be readily substituted for one another. I do not want to assert that 8-year-olds are incapable of distinguishing between the concepts of seasonal changes and of disease. However, when these children imagine an evolution over time, they tend to confuse these concepts. The fact that level I children managed to seriate five pictures representing successive stages of the disease correctly reveals the important difference between a recognition task dealing with cues that indicate an evolution and an evocation task which consists of reconstructing the evolutive process. The status of the future changes considerably between levels I and III. Younger subjects envisaged one change in the future, whose nature was different from that of the past changes. Toward the age of 11 years, children depicted a future evolution which was in continuity with the past changes and they imagined a variety of outcomes. Thus it is only at this level that the future acquires its true status of a set of possible events. As far as the temporal intervals thought to occur between the stages of the disease were concerned, this experiment replicates the findings of the preceding experiment about tree growth. Some of the 8- and 9-year-olds (almost a third of them) imagined fixed temporal intervals between each picture. This suggests that young children have difficulties in dissociating the representation of the passing of time from the representation of the stages of a process. This point deserves to be studied further and will be investigated more thoroughly in a subsequent experiment bearing on physical transformations.


As far as the nature of changes was concerned, younger subjects depicted quantitative modifications (changes of height or of number of leaves) whereas 11-year-olds mentioned more qualitative transformations like the weakening of the tree, its dryness or rotting and the spreading of the disease inside the tree. This developmental tendency is similar to what we observed concerning tree growth. An experiment should not only confirm hypotheses but also suggest new ones. In this respect, the present research allowed us to observe a new developmental trend: the tendency of older children to refer not only to external changes, as younger children do, but also to allude to an internal process, that is, to what is going on inside the tree. This observation mirrors results obtained by other authors. An advanced form of understanding of biological processes stresses the internal structures rather than the external appearances (Gelman, 1989). Carey (1985) asserts that toward the age of 9 years, children have constructed a model of biological functioning in which substances like air and blood are supposed to pass through the body and be used by it. The 9-year-olds in our experiment very seldom mentioned the idea of internal propagation when they described changes due to the disease. This might stem from a décalage (internalization would be conceived of later on where plants are concerned). It is more likely that children of 9 years of age know that things happen inside trees, but do not resort to this idea when they explain changes over time. From this experiment on the spruce tree disease it can be concluded that children initially think in terms of external transformations and that the consideration of internal phenomena corresponds to a more developed form of diachronic thinking. We shall have to see whether this modification of the nature of the conceived changes can be observed in other experiments or whether it is restricted to the topic of the spruce tree disease. The current experiment raises two further questions: first an apparent contradiction with the results obtained concerning the growth of the tree, second the issue of the distinction between the development of diachronic thinking and the improvement of domain-specific knowledge. I have characterized the development of diachronic thinking as applied to the growth of a tree by the passage from a snapshot representation, where a single aspect is modified (enlargement of the tree) to the representation of qualitatively different stages. Therefore, the discontinuity in the drawings of the growth of the tree was greater in the 11-year-old children than in the 9-year-olds. In contrast, as far as the tree disease is concerned, I consider that the continuity between successive states is a criterion of an advanced diachronic approach. The contradiction disappears if it is admitted that the discontinuity in the older children’s drawings depicting stages of growth is only apparent. The fact that they depicted different stages in the growth does not mean that these children were unaware of the existence of a connection between these stages. Further results described in the following chapters will confirm the increasing importance with age of the continuous character of evolutive phenomena.


I will also show in the following pages that the development of diachronic thinking cannot be confused with the improvement of specific knowledge about the phenomena considered by the child. Concerning forest disease, one may think that the reference to internal phenomena (like the propagation of microbes or pollution by the sap) simply results from the learning of new information in this domain. As for the differences between recognitive and evocative behaviours, it is necessary to differentiate between stored knowledge and spontaneously applied knowledge. Children aged 8 and 9 have certainly heard about the sap and the blood. They do not, however, use these concepts when they explain the tree disease, because they tend to limit themselves to the representation of external changes. This is a hypothesis whose general applicability will have to be confirmed by further experiments. The Reforestation of the Amazon: Representations of Cyclical Changes in the Distant Future Objectives and Problems In the two preceding experiments, the evolutive phenomenon studied concerned one individual example of a species of plant. However, if we ask children to imagine changes in time relating to a group of plants (in this case a forest) we will be able to test a number of hypotheses derived from our earlier observations and study a new set of problems. The first of these problems concerns the independence of biological change from human intervention. Do children, inspired by some remnant of what Piaget (1972a) termed artificialism, imagine that naturally occurring phenomena are the result of human actions? Or, in contrast, do they think that plant growth occurs spontaneously and cyclically? This question goes beyond the simple study of the explanations of biological phenomena and carries us into the domain of diachronic thinking. In fact, the reactions of children to the problem of the spontaneity of biological transformations reveal their tendency to represent changes in time and their linear or cyclical conception of these changes. These are indeed questions which bear on the problem of diachronic thinking. The results of research conducted by Stavy and Wax (1989) suggest that we should observe a development in children’s attitudes to this question between the ages of 7 and 11. Stavy noted that the proportion of children who attribute a reproductive function to plants varies between 50 per cent and 65 per cent between the ages of 7 and 9 and reaches a distinctly higher level at the age of 10 (at least 80 per cent of subjects). The same author also observed that even at 12 years of age, a number of children still did not think of plant growth within the framework of a reproductive cycle. The second problem we wished to study in connection with representations of growth concerns their uniform or non-uniform character. In effect, if the future


of a forest is not conceived of as a static phenomenon (persistence of the current state), its development can be imagined as unidirectional (continuous growth), bidirectional, that is to say comprising two aspects (growth followed by decay) or cyclical (growth and decay followed by the growth of a new tree) in nature. The bidirectional and cyclical representations reveal a richer, more extensive capacity for diachronic thinking. If we are correct in considering this more highly developed diachronic approach to make its appearance at the age of 10 to 11 years, then these ‘varied’ representations should also be observable in subjects of this age. The current experiment will allow us to verify this hypothesis. Moreover, we hope that the results will provide us with information concerning our hypothesis relating to the introduction of continuity into representations of change from the age of 10 to 11 onwards. I consider this to be a fundamental step in the development of the diachronic approach. However, while such progress can be observed in the behaviour concerning tree disease, the representations of tree growth observed at about the age of 10 seem to suggest that it is discontinuity that predominates. We therefore decided to return to the subject of growth while placing it in a different context. Our primary object of interest in this experiment is the study of the future mode. In consequence, the changes which the children are asked to imagine are considered to take place after the initial situation which has been presented to them. One question which needs to be asked concerns the way in which future time is differentiated. We might well wonder whether young children possess only a vague notion of the future and fail to distinguish between the near and distant future. It was for this reason that the questions which we asked related to an indeterminate future, a long-term future and a very long-term future. Despite the fact that our object of study is not temporal reasoning (because we are concerned with representations in time rather than inferences about time), we once again wish to concentrate on the relations obtaining between temporal reasoning and the diachronic approach. The fact that we are presenting a situation concerning a set of plants allows us to study the coordination of speed, space and time. This coordination forms one of the bases of temporal reasoning. When it bears on the movement of two objects, this coordination is displayed by the majority of 8-year-old children (Montangero, 1985; Piaget, 1969b), despite the fact that the way the problem is posed may cause difficulties for older children (Crépault, 1989; Siegler and Dean Richards, 1979). In the case of the two moving objects, some of the parameters to be correlated (distance travelled and relative start and end positions) are visually denned and can be ‘read’ at any time in the form of two parallel paths representing the distances travelled. However, if we turn our attention to the question of the growth of large trees compared with that of shrubs, the spatial parameters are much less clearly defined and are consequently less easy to compare. We can therefore expect our subjects to encounter a number of difficulties. Does the ability to overcome these problems evolve in parallel with the development of diachronic thinking? That is the final question that this research was intended to study.


In order to find a solution to this set of problems, Maurice-Naville designed an experiment which asked subjects to comment on the possibility of the regeneration of the Amazon forests as a function of the degree of deforestation sustained (Maurice-Naville, 1993). We have already pointed out in connection with our experiment concerning pine disease that the subject of forest disease worries adults and children alike. It is, moreover, perfectly suited to the study of the various points listed above. Questions and Population Familiarization with the pictures presented After a conversation about the Amazon forests, the child was presented with three photographs of deforested areas in this region: P1. Small area. ‘Men cleared this part of the forest in order to build a hut.’ P2. Larger area. ‘Men have deforested this part of the forest to grow crops.’ P3. Large-scale deforestation. ‘Men cleared this part of the forest to exploit the subsoil, for under the forest, the ground is very rich in iron ore.’ In order to be sure that the degree of deforestation was evaluated correctly, we asked the subjects to classify the photographs in order of increasing deforestation. The children were also asked to establish a correspondence between three pictures showing workers (lumberjacks or bulldozer drivers) in increasing numbers and the three deforested areas. Change or stability in an undetermined future ‘The workers have left the Amazon forest and nobody comes back there. Do you think it will stay like it is in the photo or will it change?’ The same question was then asked about the three different pictures (P1, P2 and P3 separately). Duration of regeneration ‘How long will it take for [P1, P2 and P3] to become a beautiful forest again?’ Relative growing speed About photo P1, which shows savannah, bushes and big trees: ‘Will it grow at the same speed everywhere?’


Situation during regeneration ‘What will it be like when half the time it needs to become a beautiful forest has passed?’ Distinction between area to be reforested and growth About P2: ‘If instead of clearing this whole area, the men had cleared only half of it, do you think it would take the same amount of time, more time or less time for it to become a nice forest again?’ Change or stability in the long-term future The question was asked about a photograph showing an intact, non-deforested part of the Amazon forests. ‘Imagine that this photo was taken when you were very young. Now imagine that you come back to this spot when you are an old person, at the age of 85. In the meantime, no-one has been into the forest. You take a photo. Will it be the same as this photo or will it have changed?’ Change or stability in the very long-term future Same question as the preceding one, but the interval between the first and second photo is of a thousand years. Population The population comprised 66 subjects divided into five age-groups of 12 to 15 subjects each: 7 years (7:0 to 7:11, M=7:3), 8 years (8:2 to 8:11, M=8:5), 9 years (9:0 to 9:11, M=9:4), 10 years (10:3 to 10:11, M=10:9) and 11 years (11:3 to 12: 6, M=11:6). Results Representation of changes The representation of autonomous changes (that is, without human intervention) in deforested woods develops considerably with age (see table 3.5). In answer to the question: ‘Will it always stay like this?’ more than half the subjects aged 7 and 8 years did not anticipate any change. In our sample of children, there was an important effect of the sex variable: girls anticipated a status quo, whereas boys imagined some slight changes. Moreover, the more deforested the area, the more generalized was the anticipation of a status quo. From 9 onwards, the majority of children thought that the forest would change. However, only a minority of 9-year-olds (42 per cent) believed in the possibility


Table 3.5: State of the forest in undetermined future. Percentage of subjects per age-group anticipating a change or not

of an autonomous regeneration of the forest. Of the subjects of this age who predicted a change, 37 per cent anticipated a decay (that is, the tree would go rotten). At the ages of 10 and 11, children’s theories on this question had changed. Almost all of them expected the forest to change and only a few subjects (25 per cent or less) predicted decay. However, when confronted by large-scale deforestation, as in photo P3, some of these children anticipated no change (more than half of the subjects at 10, 38 per cent at 11 years). Qualitative aspect of changes How did the children envisage the nature of changes in deforested areas? Their answers to our questions about the state of the area when half the time necessary for regeneration has elapsed gave us some information about this point. The most striking difference between the answers of younger and older subjects lies in the static or dynamic nature of the description. At 7 and 8 years, they described a state: ‘There will be big trees and small trees’ or ‘There will be more trees’ or ‘Big trees will have fallen down, and the others will be half of their normal height.’ In 44 per cent of the subjects at the age of 9 and in the majority of 10- and 11year olds (about 65 per cent), answers alluded to a dynamic process such as growing, evolving, disappearing. These children also often mentioned a difference in the speed of growth. For example, one child said: ‘Small trees will grow a little, but they will remain smaller than the big trees. Big ones will not grow, they are tall enough.’ Speed of growth When they were specifically questioned about the speed of growth, younger children imagined different speeds for big and small trees. This showed that, on request, young children are able to differentiate between the speeds as a function


of the age of the tree. However, the temporal reasoning underlying young children’s speed judgements was far from correct. These children judged that big trees grew faster than small ones: ‘The big ones grow faster, because they were planted first’ (child aged 7:10). Such answers resulted from a confusion between two meanings of the term faster in French (plus vite), the correct, usual cinematic meaning (faster) and the ordinal meaning (first) that can be found in children’s language. The speed judgement ‘bigger entails faster’ could be observed in all the 7-year olds, 69 per cent of the 8-year olds and still 58 per cent of the children aged 9. From the age of 10 onwards, this type of judgement became extremely rare (8– 13 per cent of the subjects). These older children not only related the speed of growth to the age of the tree, but they judged that young trees would grow faster. Moreover they thought that the speed of growth depended on several factors such as the age of the tree, the quality of the soil and the water available. Changes in the long-term future Let us consider the results relating to the long-term or very long-term future (see table 3.6). As already mentioned, these questions were not asked about deforested areas, but about an intact part of the forest shown in a photograph. Four types of answers could be given: • • • •

status quo (The forest will remain as it is in the photo); indeterminate change (It will not be the same); decay (Trees are going to dry or rot); renewal (New trees will grow).

When the interval is of 85 years, the majority of the 7- and 8-year-olds anticipated an unspecified change. A third of the 7-year-olds, however, thought that nothing would change. At the age of 9, they all imagined some kind of modification and the idea of decay was mentioned by the majority of children (73 per cent of them referred to decay alone or together with the renewal of other trees whereas the anticipation of renewal, alone or together with decay, was found in only 27 per cent of the children of that age). In the 10- and 11-year-olds the idea of decay was still predominant, but the concept of renewal appeared in the answers of half the subjects. When subjects were asked to anticipate the state of the forest after an interval of a thousand years, the proportions of types of answers changed (see table 3.7). At the age of 7, answers of the status quo type were practically nonexistent. Besides, a small minority (around 20 per cent) of young children referred to the ideas of decay and renewal. A third of the 9-year-olds were puzzled by the question and said they did not know the answer. At the ages of 10 and 11, the concept of renewal appeared very frequently and predominated over the idea of decay.


Table 3.6: State of the forest in 85 years. Percentage of subjects per age-group and type of response

Table 3.7: State of the forest in a thousand years. Percentage of subjects per age-group and type of response

The answers mentioning both the ideas of decay and renewal were very rare before the age of 10 and were given by half the 10- and 11-year-olds for an interval of 85 years. When the delay was of a thousand years, the percentage of subjects giving such answers diminished at the age of 10: the majority thought that the trees in the initial photo would have disappeared and would be replaced by new trees. In contrast, 11-year-olds anticipated both decayed and renewed trees. This probably does not mean that they thought the life expectancy of trees was a thousand years, but rather that they imagined that after such a time some of the trees (different from the trees on the initial photo) would be decaying whereas other trees would be in full health. Regeneration period for half the deforested area The last result that will be described here is related to the evaluation of the relative duration (more or less time) of regeneration when only half the area shown in picture P2 is deforested. Three categories of answers could be observed.


Table 3.8: Duration of regeneration of half the P2 area. Percentage of subjects per agegroup and type of evaluation

In the first one, the time for regeneration of half the area is longer than the duration necessary for the whole area to be reforested. This is an inverse relation (less area entails more time), which is somewhat surprising. Children’s comments revealed that they imagined that regeneration depended on human intervention. According to these children, people would take care of larger areas first, hence the shorter time needed for their regeneration. In the second category of answer, the regenerating of half the area takes less time than the regeneration of the whole. Lastly, in the third type of response, the regeneration time is equal for half the area and the total area. Such answers show that children differentiate between the extent of the area to be regenerated (horizontal growth) and the growth of trees (vertical growth), which does not depend on the extent of the area. Table 3.8 shows the frequency of answers of the different categories in each age-group. At the age of 7, the most frequent answer (50 per cent of the subjects) was of the first category. A quarter of these children established a relation belonging to the second category (less area=less time). Another quarter judged that durations were equal for half the area and the total area, because in both cases people would take care of the forest. The 8-year-olds’ answers were equally divided between the first category (less area=less time) and the second (half the area=half the time). At the age of 9 the first category of answers disappeared, with a clear majority of answers (82 per cent) falling into the second category (less area=less time). This type of answer still predominated at the age of 10 (60 per cent of answers). The third category of answers (less area but equal time) appeared in an important minority of the 10year-olds (40 per cent) and in the majority of 11-year-olds. Summary and Conclusion Striking changes take place, between the ages of 7 and 11 years, in the anticipation of the regeneration or the decay of a forest. These changes do not


only reflect a transformation of the children’s biological concepts, in accordance with the findings of Carey (1985). They also express the development of diachronic thinking. The progression of the more or less developed behaviours that constitute this development will be summarized below. After that, I will sum up the main characteristics of each age-group. Concerning the reforestation of deforested areas, the most primitive behaviour consists in imagining that nothing will grow again without human intervention. This residue of artificialism (that is, the tendency to think that natural phenomena have a human origin) shows that no reproductive function is attributed to plants, in accordance with Stavy and Wax’s (1989) findings in children younger than 10. In my opinion, this result does not only stem from a lack of biological knowledge. This type of answer is also (and perhaps mainly) due to the fact that young children have difficulty in imagining cycles of changes in the future. Another type of answer is the anticipation of the decay of the remaining trees, rather than of the growth of new trees. In this case, the future is conceived of as an extension of the past (the forest deteriorates). From a diachronic viewpoint, it reveals that a relation of identity is established between the past and the future. The third type of answer, which is typical of older subjects, consists in anticipating the growth of trees in the deforested area. The direction of the changes anticipated (growth) is opposite to that of the preceding human intervention (deforestation). When children have to imagine the state of an intact part of the forest in the long-term future, the three types of answers described above can be observed, with importance of the idea of growth diminishing. The fact that the first type of answer (absence of change, in this case after an interval of 85 years) is also given by some children shows that the static aspect of younger children’s answers is not necessarily due to a lack of knowledge concerning the growth of trees. In addition to the three types of answers already observed for the reforestation, another answer can be found when children anticipate long-term transformations of the forest: the reference to a renewal. The forest will still be there, but it will be composed of new trees. From the point of view of diachrony, this idea implies the representation of a continuous cycle of transformations. The apparently most advanced form of anticipation consists of imagining both decayed and new trees. In this case, the child simultaneously envisages different kinds of changes. Our experiment reveals that children have differentiated representations when they consider an undetermined, a long-term or a very long-term future. Even though the notion of future is rather poor in young children (as shown in the experiment on tree disease and other studies on this topic), an interval of a thousand years lowers the proportion of subjects who do not anticipate any change. In older children, such a long-term interval entails qualitative changes in the representation of transformations. The proportion of representations of renewal increases considerably.


In order to understand how children view a step in the future development of a forest, we must take into account their answers to the question about the state of a deforested area after half the time necessary for its regeneration has elapsed. Two types of conceptions succeed one another between the ages of 7–8 years and 10–11 years. Younger children have static representations of more or less differentiated configurations (‘There will be more trees’ or ‘Big trees and small trees’). Older children have a dynamic conception of steps within a growth process (with reference to the fact that ‘trees grow’ or ‘the forest evolves’). This indicates that more developed representations of changes have a greater continuity than the conceptions of younger children. This aspect of continuity is also revealed by the anticipation of a renewal, which can be found in 10- and 11year olds’ answers. The anticipation of a renewal of the forest in 85 or a thousand years implies the representation of a sequence where the trees currently alive first decay, then die, then are replaced by new ones. Thus we find in these results a confirmation of the hypothesis that was put forward in the previous section about tree disease: the steps of a transformation imagined by younger children are discontinuous states, whereas older children introduce a link between these states. As far as temporal reasoning is concerned, young subjects do not correctly coordinate the duration of growth, the speed of growth, the order of succession (big trees have grown before small ones) and height. For this reason, they think that ‘taller’ entails ‘faster’: big trees have been planted first, therefore they grow faster. This also reveals some limitations in diachronic thinking: The past (when big trees have grown more than small trees) and the future are not well dissociated. In contrast, more evolved answers present the future as different from the past and dependent on the present state. The big trees are probably assimilated to grown up people and are expected to keep the same height or to grow a little, whereas small trees are expected to grow faster. These answers are based on an inverse relationship between speed and height. Moreover, explanations are multicausal at this level of development, like the explanations observed in the experiment on forest disease. Children mention several factors of growth and several possibilities. The question about the length of time necessary for half the deforested area to be reforested elicits answers of three different levels. At the first level, children think that more time will be necessary for half the area to be reforested, at the second they think that the duration is proportional to the area involved and, at the third level, they dissociate the surface area vegetation from its vertical growth. As a matter of fact, the duration of growth does not depend on the extent of the area. This judgement results both from a development of the concepts of time and space, which can be well dissociated, and from progress in diachronic thinking. The latter enables children to anticipate distinct evolutions during the same interval of time. Let us now recapitulate the characteristics of the two main levels of answers concerning forest regeneration. At the ages of 7 and 8, more than half the


children do not anticipate any change in a deforested area in the absence of human intervention. As far as an intact forest is concerned, and after a long-term interval of 85 years, the majority of these children anticipate some changes, but they do not mention decay or renewal. The answers are different when the interval is longer (a thousand years) in a minority of the subjects only. At this level of development, children have a static conception of the steps of reforestation and do not refer to the continuous process of growth. Concerning the speed of growth, 7- and 8-year olds imagine that big trees will grow faster than small ones. Lastly, they anticipate that if the deforested area is smaller, the time for regeneration is either longer or shorter than the period necessary for a larger area to regenerate. On the whole, these children anticipate only limited changes and do not correctly coordinate the speed of growth and the age (or height) of the trees. At the ages of 10 and 11 years, the conceptions of future modifications change completely. Most children think that a deforested area will regenerate. They become able to anticipate varied and cyclical transformations in the long term: The trees grow, then they decay and they are eventually replaced by other trees. Intermediate steps are described in a dynamic way, like different moments in a process of changes. The relationship between the height (and age) of the tree and its speed of growth is reversed (‘taller’ entails ‘less fast’). Lastly the oldest of these children (that is, 11-year-olds) are able to dissociate a development in the vertical plane (growth of the trees) from the extent of the vegetation in the horizontal plane. In 9-year-olds, the proportions of answers falling into the different categories are intermediate between those of younger and older children. From a qualitative viewpoint, these children’s conceptions are characterized by the importance of the idea of decay. Rather surprisingly, this idea also appears when they imagine the future of a deforested area. The same concept of decay is frequently mentioned when they anticipate the state of an intact forest in the long term (85 years) and it is not replaced by the concept of renewal when the interval is a thousand years. What have we learned from this experiment concerning the components and the development of a diachronic approach? First, an evolved form of diachronic thinking can be defined by the ability to anticipate varied and cyclical transformations within evolutive process. Such an ability is involved in the anticipation of the renewal of the trees of a forest. Renewal implies a succession of changes that differ both in nature and direction. Growth and maturity are followed by decay and death and the latter is followed by another process of growth. A second conclusion that results from this experiment is the striking parallelism between the developments of both cinematic reasoning and the diachronic perspective when they bear on a process of growth. The conceptual confusions between time, speed and spatial extent (involved in the judgement: ‘Taller trees will grow faster’) disappear when children’s diachronic thinking


improves (ability to anticipate a renewal cycle). Simultaneously (in the majority of 11-year-olds), children become able to perform complex spatial-temporal dissociations, as witnessed by the distinction they introduce between horizontal surface and vertical growth. General Conclusions to Chapter 3: Biological Knowledge and the Diachronic Approach An observation of the way in which children aged between 7–8 and 11–12 reconstruct or anticipate the stages of tree growth or decay reveals striking modifications which, depending on the particular object of study, take place in the majority of children at the age of 10 or 11. First, these changes consist of an improvement in the understanding of biological phenomena. Disease is no longer thought of as something that progresses in an abrupt and external manner but instead is seen as a biological process which depends on the circulation of sap, the age of the tree etc. Cleared areas of forest are expected to grow back without human intervention— provided that the level of deforestation is not too high. The future of a forest is viewed as a cycle extending over multiple generations. This enhancement of biological knowledge corresponds to the restructurings which have been reported by Carey (1985) at about age 10. However, it should also be noted that certain advances are not observed until the age of 11–12 (for example, the appearance of a multicausal explanation of disease or the regeneration of the forest) and that there is no reason to believe, as might be concluded from Carey’s work, that the biological conceptions of 10-year-old children are in every respect similar to those of adults. What needs to be emphasized here, following our three experiments concerning the past and future of trees, is the progress observed in the diachronic approach employed by the subjects. For example, the ability to conceive of a series of varied changes in both nature and direction illustrates the functioning of diachronic thinking and not of a particular item of knowledge concerning biological phenomena. Thus 7- or 8-year-old children most certainly know that trees are not eternal. The animistic tendencies exhibited by young children— confirmed by research conducted by Carey (1985) and Ochiai (1989)— undoubtedly lead them to model the life of a tree on that of a person. Despite this, they do not anticipate the decay or renewal of a forest even in the very long term. This failing must be due to an insufficiently developed capacity for diachronic thinking. In contrast, the older children think of a tree from a diachronic perspective, viewing it as something that is born, changes and gives birth to other trees as time progresses. It is possible to provide further examples of difficulties observed, sometimes up to the age of 9, which are due to an inadequate diachronic approach and not to a lack of biological knowledge. The confusion between the passage of the seasons and the progress of a disease which was observed in some of the


children’s drawings results not from the inability to distinguish between these two concepts but from the difficulty the subjects experience when trying to imagine multiple evolutive phenomena simultaneously. As a result, they simply alternate between the various phenomena. Moreover, the failure of the youngest children to establish any continuity between the past and the future, as was observed in connection with the diseased spruces, again relates to diachronic thinking. The same is true of the static or dynamic vision of the future. Children of 7 or 8 years of age know that trees grow. It is not therefore a lack of biological knowledge that leads them to expect no long-term change in a forest or prompts them to provide a static description of the intermediate stages of forest growth. Let us summarize what the last three experiments have taught us about the diachronic approach between the ages of 7 and 12. Most children of 7, 8 and 9 years of age are perfectly capable of imagining the past stages and a future stage of a biological phenomenon. They reconstruct and seriate the stages of a transformation, provided that these stages are presented as ‘snapshots’ within a homogeneous transformation, that is to say one which concerns a single dimension. These snapshots are considered to be states which possess no real connection with one another. Transformations in time are apprehended as external phenomena. These children are not able to dissociate and consider a variety of evolutive processes simultaneously (ageing and the passing seasons, for example, or decay and growth). The future is the object of relatively unvaried representations. At about the age of 10 or 11, our subjects’ capacities for diachronic thinking are significantly enriched. At this age, children reconstruct or anticipate a much wider variety of changes. They are aware that time brings a range of modifications, many of which are thought of as qualitative transformations. However, while they depict a variety of stages, they are able to introduce an element of continuity between them by thinking in terms of internal processes and by linking the phases of a transgenerational cycle. Their descriptions of stages of growth, which make use of terms such as ‘grow’ and ‘develop’, testify to this continuous, dynamic vision. These children also simultaneously take account of a variety of evolutive processes which progress at different rates (ageing, seasons, disease, the growth of trees or shrubs etc.). At this level, the conception of the future is considerably enriched. On the one hand, the future is viewed as a set of varied possibilities while, on the other, these children are capable of the spontaneous representation of transformational cycles. It is clear that the representation of a cycle is based on the ability to imagine changes of different types and directions which, nevertheless, combine to yield continuity. It is striking that in its main characteristics the diachronic approach develops in the same way for an irreversible phenomenon such as growth and for reversible processes such as decay due to disease. At the same time as witnessing these changes in the diachronic approach, we have also been able to observe modifications in the application of temporal reasoning (measurements of time) to evolutive processes. Some of the 7- to 9-


year-old children imagine that there is a fixed interval between drawings or photographs representing a change over time. Most of them are unable to establish a correspondence between their estimation of the total duration of the process and the age of the tree at each stage. They find it difficult to dissociate size, age and speed of growth. These difficulties disappear in children aged 10 and more. Their estimates of time are no longer discrepant. Age is therefore considered as indicative of an elapsed duration, a characteristic which is not observed in the younger children. Moreover, the relationship between speed of growth and tree size is inverted. Globally, we can observe important advances at three levels between the ages of 7–8 and 11: in biological knowledge, the diachronic approach and the application of temporal reasoning to evolutive processes. I hypothesize that the improvements in the first two levels (biology and diachronic approach) develop in tandem. A sound understanding of biological processes implies an ability to think of things in time. It is necessary to establish links between origins and stages of development, imagine cycles, think in terms of internal transformations over time. Viewed from this perspective, biological knowledge is dependent on the development of the diachronic approach. At the same time, the acquisition of knowledge about living organisms— and children’s interest in such knowledge—provides the content which is necessary for the expansion of diachronic thinking. Here we are in the presence of a developmental circle: progress in one domain informs development in the other domain which, in turn, has an effect on the first. My hypothesis concerning temporal reasoning is different. We know that 8year-old children establish complex correspondences between speed, time and space when confronted by easily representable events (such as the movement of two objects or the successive activation of two lights). In my opinion, such reasonings are not generalized to biological changes because diachronic thinking is not sufficiently developed to make a clear representation of these changes possible. To conclude, I should emphasize that these results draw attention to the necessary distinction between the ability to store and recognize knowledge which can be activated only by an explicit request and the spontaneous use of this knowledge. This can be clearly observed in connection with the idea of cycles and the recovery of a forest, phenomena which 7- and 8-year-old children are most certainly capable of understanding and recognizing when required to do so. However, these same children do not make use of the content of this knowledge when asked to predict the future of a forest. Despite my arguments to the contrary, some readers may still think that the development of the diachronic approach which has been revealed is rigidly connected to the knowledge contents studied in this chapter. If this approach is indeed a mode of apprehending reality which can be applied to a variety of


contents, then it should be possible to study it in contexts completely different from the representation of the growth and decay of plants. This is the challenge we shall take up in the following chapter which will concentrate on physical phenomena, that is to say inanimate objects obeying the laws of causality.

Chapter 4 The Diachronic Approach and Physical Transformations

A Story of Thawing Ice: an Introduction to Duration in Causal Explanation Objectives and Problems The comprehension of changes over time is one of the elements involved in causal explanation. In fact, the intimate relationship between causality and time is apparent in the very definition of causality as proposed by Hume. This definition evokes the temporal relations, of succession and contiguity, between cause and effect. A number of studies conducted in the field of developmental psychology have revealed this close association of temporal and causal relations. For certain authors, such as Piaget, the knowledge of time is founded on a knowledge of causal relations. However, the majority of authors emphasize the time-dependent nature of causal relations. Evoking a theory first proposed by the philosopher Brunschvicg, Piaget claimed that the temporal order of events is based on a knowledge of the pragmatic links or causal relations which obtain between these events. In his study of the development of temporal reasoning (Piaget, 1969b), the author explains the progress observed in a task requiring the reconstruction of a temporal order in terms of causal relations. It is worth examining this experiment in some detail because, in my opinion, it mobilizes a number of elements of the diachronic approach. The experiment consists of asking the subjects to watch a coloured liquid flow from an upper container, which is initially full and which we shall term A, to a lower, empty container termed B. The liquid flows from A to B in a number of stages and the subjects are asked to draw the level of the liquid in the two containers at each stage. When the drawings are then presented out of sequence, children aged approximately 6 to 7 are able to reconstruct the chronological order on the basis either of the progressive lowering of the level in container A or its progressive raising in container B. However, when the drawings are cut in two, that is to say when the graphic representations of containers A and B are


separated, the task is only successfully completed at a more advanced age. The younger subjects appear unable to establish a correspondence between drawings of A and B which portray developments in contrasting directions (as time passes the level drops in A and rises in B). The subjects who at the age of 8 to 9 are generally able to establish a correspondence between the separated drawings and seriate them correctly do so on the basis of the movement of liquid from A to B. Piaget concludes from this that it is the understanding and awareness of the physical phenomenon of liquid movement that enables subjects to reconstruct the order of temporal succession. Thus the understanding of temporal relations is founded on the ability to grasp causal relations. Here we should note two points. First, children possess an idea of temporal order which allows them to distinguish between before and after at the moment the flow of liquid is observed. Second, the task of establishing a correspondence between the two sets of drawings and the task of seriating them demands a developed diachronic approach in view of the necessity of simultaneously taking account of two developments operating in different directions. Research into the reconstruction of a series of pictures representing a succession of events (Bonnens, 1990; Brown and French, 1976; French, 1989) tends to confirm the fact that it is the coordination of causes and effects that permits the reconstruction of the temporal direction of events. The contrary (or reciprocal) hypothesis of the time-dependent nature of the causal link is confirmed by a large number of studies in the field of developmental psychology as well as by research into the perception of causality (Michotte, 1963): the order of succession and temporal contiguity play an important role in the comprehension of the links between cause and effect. This can already be observed in the infant (Leslie, 1984) and the very young child (Bullock, Gelman and Baillargeon, 1982; White, 1988). In these various studies, time generally takes on an ordinal character. Duration, that is to say time perceived in the form of an interval, is most frequently mentioned in opposition to causality: if there is a gap between cause and effect then the absence of contiguity weakens or even eradicates the causal link. However, time intervals are involved in causal phenomena and it is precisely these intervals that are of interest for our study of diachronic thinking. In effect, diachrony is not limited to the introduction of an order of succession between phenomena. It integrates phenomena into duration. How can this duration affect causal explanation? First, the occurrence of a physical phenomenon needs a certain period of time. Moreover, when taken in connection with the two components of a causal relation (cause and effect), duration may have a role to play at the level of the cause, the interval between cause and effect or at the level of the effect. Some causes produce an immediate effect while others take time before an effect is observed. In the latter case there is necessarily an interval between the moment at which the cause appears and the point at which the effect is observed. The effect may also be limited or extended in time.

THE DIACHRONIC APPROACH AND PHYSICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 57

My hypothesis is that as long as children possess only a poorly developed diachronic approach they find it difficult to imagine a phenomenon which has an extended cause and which requires an interval before the effect is produced. In effect, this type of representation requires the correct integration of the various aspects of the phenomenon in time and the simultaneous representation of two distinct developments or temporal processes: the development of the cause and that of the effect. In order to study this question, Dionnet invented a task in which children represent causes and effects even though this is not explicitly asked of them. This representation initially takes the form of a brief picture story before being subsequently verbalized (Dionnet, 1993; Dionnet and Montangero, 1991). I pointed out at the start of this chapter that the understanding of a set of pictures which tell a story has been studied by numerous researchers. As far as I know, the production of a picture story has never been systematically studied. The only aspect of the drawings produced by the subjects which was of interest in this experiment was the way in which they conceived of the cause of and stages in a physical change which is well known to children, namely the transformation of ice into water. In these representations of the causal sequence, we shall attempt to discover whether or not the explanation of a stage in the transformation refers to a previous stage. In effect, one key characteristic of the diachronic approach consists of explaining a state at least partially in terms of what preceded it. The subject of thawing ice also allows us to study a question raised by some of the results obtained in the research presented in Chapter 3. It may be recalled that some children aged 9 and younger believe that a fixed time interval separates the drawings or photos which represent the stages of a transformation. I believe that this behaviour is the result of a difficulty in dissociating the representation of the progress of time itself from the representation of the stages of the evolutive process. In other words, young children tend to think that the drawings or photos which depict successive stages also represent the passage of time. That is why, for example, they often believe that if there are four drawings then the change has taken four days (or four months or four years). If this interpretation is correct then the subjects who possess a largely undeveloped diachronic approach will tend to consider that the number of drawings representing the stages of a transformation will vary as a function of the duration of this transformation. In contrast, the children who possess a more developed diachronic approach will think that the number of drawings required to represent a transformation will be the same however long this transformation takes to complete. It was in order to study this point that Dionnet designed a second part to the experiment which we shall discuss below.


Method and Population Part one: imagining and representing graphically a sequence of events that led to the situation presented The child was presented with a drawing representing a step in a physical transformation, namely ice thawing. The situation presented lent itself naturally to narration because it depicted two story-book characters (Babar and Celeste) in a difficult situation: they were skating on blocks of ice floating on water (see Figure 4.1 a). The causal phenomenon we wanted to study thus appeared as an element of a narration. The subject had to describe the image, then imagine what must have happened and finally draw what had taken place before the situation presented and what would take place afterwards. The child understood that the task consisted of drawing a story about Babar and Celeste skating and that the story had to include the image first presented. With this aim in view, we provided sheets of papers on which just the two characters were drawn (see Figure 4.1 b). When the subjects had finished drawing a ‘story’ or ‘scenario’, they were asked to comment upon the drawings and to indicate what was the cause of the thawing, at what moment the cause started and whether it was present in more than one of the steps depicted in the drawings.

Figure 4.1: Drawings presented to the subjects: (a) first drawing (b) basic drawing to be completed Source: Reproduced from Dionnet, S. and Montangero, J. (1991) Temps de la cause et temps de l’effet dans la représentation du changement chez des enfants de sept à douze ans, Archives de Psychologie, 59(231), 281–300, with kind permission of Archives de Psychologie, Genève, Suisse.


Part two: representations of the change of the state of matter as a function of the duration of the transformation The task was first to draw the internal transformations of an ice cube during several steps of the melting process. Children were told that the ice container had just been taken out of the freezer. They were asked to draw the relative space occupied by the ice and by the water in the different steps of the transformation and to draw as many pictures as they wanted in order to show how the ice is transformed into water. When the drawings were completed, the subjects were asked whether the same series of drawings could represent what happened when the ice cube is placed in a very hot room and thaws rapidly. A similar question was asked about an ice cube taken out of the freezer and put in a cold room. The experimenter then asked: ‘Why do you think that it is possible (or not possible) to keep the same series of drawings?’ Population The population comprised 60 children aged from 7 to 12 years, divided into three age-groups of 20 children each: 7–8 years (M=8:1), 9–10 years (M=10:0) and 11– 12 years (M=11:11). Results and Discussion Part one: type of scenarios produced The series of drawings produced by the children in order to depict what happened to Babar and Celeste could be allocated to four categories, depending on the lasting or immediate character of the cause and the immediate or deferred occurrence of the effect. In order to illustrate these different categories, we will choose scenarios comprising the same number of drawings (namely four images), although some children produced scenarios containing a different number of drawings. In the first type of scenario (see S1, figure 4.2), the cause was punctual and the effect was immediate. Here is an example of comments made by a child producing such a scenario: • • • •

‘Babar and Celeste are ice-skating.’ ‘All of a sudden a boat runs into the ice and breaks it.’ ‘Babar and Celeste find themselves on little bits of ice.’ ‘They fall in the water.’

In this type of scenario, duration was absent at the three levels of the cause, the cause-effect sequence and the effect. The child imagined a causal chain in


the form of a succession, without any mention or depiction of a temporal interval. The second type of scenario (see S2, figure 4.2) depicted a lasting and progressive cause accompanied by an immediate effect. The verbal description of such series of drawings took the following forms: • • • •

‘Babar and Celeste are ice-skating.’ ‘The sun comes out and starts to melt the ice.’ ‘The sun gets hotter and hotter and makes the ice melt more.’ ‘The sun gets so hot that it melts all the ice and Babar and Celeste fall in the water.’

In this type of scenario, duration played a role at the levels of both the cause and the effect. In contrast, there was no interval between the cause and the effect. This type of scenario depicted a clear covariation between the two components of the causal relation. It referred to a single transformational process which simultaneously involved the cause and the effect. In the third type of scenario (see S3, figure 4.2), there was a lasting cause and a deferred effect. However, from the moment the effect occurred, it covaried with the cause. Here are the child’s comments: • ‘Babar and Celeste are ice-skating, they are making marks on the ice.’ • ‘They go on skating, they make more and more marks. The ice which is too thin is beginning to crack.’ • ‘The more they skate, the more the ice cracks. Babar and Celeste are left on little bits of ice.’ • ‘They fall in the water.’ In these scenarios, it was possible to observe not only the introduction of duration at the level of the cause (as in S2), but also a dissociation between the time of the cause and the time of the effect. At the beginning of the story (first two pictures) there was no covariation between cause and effect, hence the delay between these two aspects of the phenomenon. However, as soon as the effect occurred (third drawing), it was thought to develop in parallel with the cause. The fourth type of scenario depicted a lasting cause and a deferred effect whose evolution did not covary with the evolution of the cause (see S4, figure 4.2). Children’s comments: • • • •

‘Babar and Celeste are skating in the sunshine.’ ‘Little by little, the sun melts the ice.’ ‘The sun goes on melting the ice and Babar and Celeste are left on bits of ice.’ ‘The ice goes on melting and Babar and Celeste end up in the water.’


Figure 4.2: Example of sequences of drawings produced by the children, for each type of scenario (S1, S2, S3 and S4) Source: Reproduced from Dionnet, S. and Montangero, J. (1991) Temps de la cause et temps de l’effet dans la représentation du changement chez des enfants de sept à douze ans, Archives de Psychologie, 59(231), 281–300, with kind permission of Archives de Psychologie, Genève, Suisse.

In this type of scenario, any covariation between the cause and the effect had disappeared. The children imagined a constant cause, whose effect was both deferred and cumulative. They conceived of two different progressions over time which overlapped but were totally dissociated. Each component of a causal relation (the cause and the effect) had its own course in time. If we consider the frequency of the scenarios of the four types in each agegroup (see table 4.1), we see that for the phenomenon of thawing ice, the majority of children in all age-groups imagined a lasting cause (scenarios S2, S3 and S4). Moreover, the type of scenario produced depended very significantly on the age of the subject (p=0.000 ± 0.000, 2000 trials). In the 7–8 year age-group the scenario S2, which involves a complete covariation of cause and effect, predominated (50 per cent of subjects) and was followed by the scenario S1 with punctual cause (30 per cent of subjects). In the next age-group (9–10 years), the same two types of scenarios predominated, with an inversion of the position of S1 and S2: punctual causality was slightly more frequent than the covariation of the effect with a lasting cause (40 per cent and 30 per cent). Thus the representation of a causal phenomenon with deferred effect (S3 and S4) was rare from the age of 7 until the age of 10 years. In contrast, the great majority of scenarios produced by the 11–12-year-olds involved such an interval. In 45 per cent of these subjects, cause and effect had completely dissociated progressions


Table 4.1: Percentage of subjects per age-group (N=20 subjects per group) and type of scenario. S1: punctual cause and immediate effect, S2: lasting cause and immediate effect, S3: lasting cause and deferred effect, S4: constant cause and deferred effect

(scenario S4) whereas in 40 per cent of the subjects the covariation reappeared as soon as the effect occurred (S3). On the whole, the introduction of an interval between the cause and the effect is a good indicator of development. However, in order to describe the evolution with age of the representation of the causal phenomenon studied, special attention must be paid to the covariation between cause and effect. The majority of children aged 10 and under tended to think that cause and effect covaried. At 11 and 12 years they dissociated these two aspects of the causal relation, a complete dissociation being observed in the scenarios of type S4. Part two: steps of the transformation when the length of the process is longer or shorter No developmental tendency could be observed in the way the phenomenon of thawing was drawn. As explained in the introductory part of this section, the point which we wanted to study was whether children thought that the speed of the transformation, and therefore its total duration, had to be taken into account in their drawings. To this end, after having produced a series of drawings depicting the stages of thawing, they were asked if the same drawings could be used to describe what happens when the ice container is taken out of the freezer and put in a very hot room. Two main types of answers were observed, each one being subdivided into two categories. In the first type, the children thought that the way melting was depicted should be different if the phenomenon took less (or more) time. They either did not specify what changed (first subcategory) or specified that the number of drawings had to be changed (second subcategory). Here is an example of an answer of this last category (child aged 9:7): ‘I will take these two drawings’ [the first and the last of the series he had first produced]. [Why?] ‘Because it melts down much faster.’ [And what happens if I put the ice in a cold room?] ‘It will be very long, we will need at least 20 drawings.’ The second type of answer consisted of retaining of the sequence of drawings, whatever the time taken by the thawing process. Children would either


Table 4.2: Figuration of thawing speed. Percentage of subjects per age-group (N=20 subjects per group) and type of response

Table 4.3: Relationship between thawing speed and type of scenario. Percentage of responses (N=60) per type

only say that the same drawings could be kept (first subcategory) or they would provide an argument, as in the following answer given by a 12-year old: ‘The same drawings can do.’ [Why?] ‘Because it melts faster but the number of steps is the same.’ [Can you explain more precisely?] ‘Because it is a whole process, it is not possible to skip some steps and jump from one stage to another.’ Table 4.2 shows the frequency of the types of answers per age-group. We can see that the first type of answers, involving a change of the drawings as a function of the speed and duration of the defrosting, was given by a majority of subjects in the first two age-groups. The assertion that the same series of drawings will do appeared in the majority of 11- to 12-year-olds. It means that most children of this age were aware that they had drawn the stages of an evolutive process and that the stages were independent from the duration of the process. What is the relationship between this ability to dissociate the stages and the duration of a process and the way in which the causal relation involved in the thawing of ice is conceived? In order to answer this question we compared, for each subject, the type of scenario produced and their response to the question about the relation between the depiction of the physical transformation and that of the time taken by the process. Table 4.3 shows that a majority of subjects dis sociating time and process (retention of the same drawings) could be found only in the group which produced a type S4 scenario. Incidentally, this confirms that S4 scenarios, which depicted a complete dissociation between the progression of


the cause and of the effect, were more advanced than S3 scenarios, since the latter were accompanied by a majority of type 1 answers (necessity of changing the number of drawings if the speed of thawing changes). Summary and Conclusion This experiment yields interesting results about both causal explanations and diachronic thinking in children. First, our findings show that the causal explanation of certain phenomena has to take into account duration and not only the order of succession. A lot of phenomena that children can directly observe at the macroscopic level are characterized by a lasting cause and a deferred effect. This is true of phenomena involving heat, for example when water or food is warmed up or when it is frozen or defrosted. Wearing effects are of the same type. Thus a battery ceases to produce an effect after a certain time of functioning. Children can experience in their bodies more or less painful consequences that are the deferred effects of a lasting cause: sunburn, colds or stiff muscles. In order to understand these phenomena, it is necessary to acknowledge that duration plays a role: there is a time interval at the level of the cause, and also between the cause and the effect. Our results show that children aged 7 and 8 can already take into consideration the fact that a cause extends over a certain period. However, before the age of 11 years they tend to imagine a covariation between the cause and the effect. The effect progresses simultaneously with the cause. This way of understanding a causal progression is clearly shown in S2 scenarios (figure 4.2). In a first step, there is no sun and the ice remains intact. In the second step the sun shines only a little, almost entirely hidden by clouds and the ice melts a little. Then the sun is hardly hidden and the ice has almost entirely melted. Finally there are no clouds, the sun shines brightly and the ice has completely disappeared. Thus children of this level conceive of a causal relation as a single progression. The correct representation of this type of phenomenon requires that the progression of the effect is dissociated from the progression of the cause. If these correct representations do not usually appear before the age of 11, it is because diachronic thinking has not sufficiently developed. As far as this modality of thinking is concerned, four conclusions can be drawn from our experiment. First, our interpretation of the children’s responses concerning tree growth or disease are confirmed. According to this interpretation, children first have the ability to imagine the steps of a single evolutive process. The ability to take account of several evolutive processes, each with its own rhythm (ageing, disease, season or growth and decay as far as trees are concerned) requires an advanced form of diachronic thinking which usually appears after the age of 10. The existence of this development is confirmed in the case of thawing ice: the representation of independent progressions for the cause and the effect appears only in the 11- to 12-year-old group.


Second, the fact that children under the age of 9 can imagine a succession of steps does not mean that they consider the phenomenon from a fully diachronic viewpoint, in which each step can be partially explained by the preceding one. Type S2 scenarios reveal that the state of the ice at a particular moment is explained only by the context (the fact that the sun is more or less hidden by the clouds). In more advanced types of scenarios, the state of the ice depends on what happened before: the sun has shone and warmed the air up. It is in these scenarios only that a continuity is established between the successive steps of a transformation. At an earlier stage of development, the transformation is understood as a succession of juxtaposed states. The third conclusion is that the hypothesis I have proposed in the preceding chapters about 7- and 8-year-old children’s representations of steps in an evolutive process is confirmed. According to this hypothesis, the sequence of drawings produced represents both moments in the passing of time and steps of the process. In the present experiment, a majority of children until the age of 10 (80 per cent at 7–8 years and 60 per cent at 9–10 years) thought that it was necessary to change the number of drawings depicting the thawing if this took more (or less) time. This clearly shows that before the age of 11 children do not tend to differentiate between the progression of time and that of the process. The development of diachronic thinking therefore also consists of the acquisition of the ability to represent steps of an evolutive process as necessary stages which are not confused with the progression of time. The last point I would like to emphasize is the existence of a strong correlation between, on the one hand, this ability to represent stages of a transformation without confusing them with the passing of time and, on the other, the level of conception of the causal phenomenon (type of scenario produced). It is only in the group of children producing a type S4 scenario, with perfect dissociation between the development of the cause and of the effect, that a majority of subjects thought that their drawings of the steps of ice thawing could illustrate a slow process of melting as well as a fast one. This result shows that the way this type of causal phenomenon is conceived is closely related to the more or less advanced level of diachronic representations. The Birth of the Stars: Children’s Representations of the Origin and Expansion of the Universe Objectives and Problems Following our study of children’s conceptions of an observable physical phenomenon, it seemed to be of interest to ask them about a phenomenon whose spatial and temporal scale debarred any observation on their part. In the complete absence of any experiential data concerning physical reality do children revert to a primitive explanatory model? In other words, should we expect their


representations of a non-observable phenomenon to be animistic or magical in character and to develop independently of their explanations of observable phenomena? I believe that if children possess no data whatsoever concerning a state of affairs they employ the conception or theories which they have constructed in connection with analogous phenomena. Thus asking subjects about unknown physical changes provides an opportunity to determine which are the most influential theories held by children and to investigate whether these theories evolve over the period of development in question. Clearly, even if the phenomenon under investigation does not fall within the scope of school tuition it will still be the object of scientific or other theories with which children may well have had contact. Thus the study of physical phenomena which are unknown to the child also enables us to determine when and how children assimilate adult theories concerning such phenomena. The phenomenon chosen for this study was the origin of the universe and the representation of its expansion. While it is impossible for children to observe these physical changes they relate to observable entities, the stars. The theory of the expansion of the universe following an initial explosion or big bang did not gain general acceptance in astrophysics until the late 1960s and general public familiarity with the concept is even more recent. The observational facts that underlie this theory (for example, the receding of galaxies and the increase in the speed of recession with distance) cannot be observed by children or, indeed, by adults other than astrophysicists. Asking children about the origin of the universe enables us to study three questions. First, is it the idea of invariance or that of change that prevails when children are asked to imagine the distant past of an apparently static phenomenon, namely the configuration of the stars? Second, this question allows us to study an aspect of diachronic thinking: the conception of the origin of a phenomenon. When children propose explanations for the origin of a phenomenon which is situated at a great spatio-temporal distance, do they transfer their knowledge of other physical or biological phenomena to this new field or do they repeat commonplace scientific explanations? Finally, this experiment is also designed to enable a study of the ability to abstract and generalize a fairly simple form of change over time based on the schematic graphic representation of the recessive movement of the stars. Taken overall, this research, which was conducted by Monzani, will allow us to determine whether a transformation in children’s representations of change is again observed from the age of 10 onwards in connection with a phenomenon which they are totally unable to observe and which is unlikely to awaken their spontaneous interest. At the same time, the results will provide new evidence for the discussion of the role of cultural data and data perceived in the development of diachronic thinking. Very little research has concentrated on children’s conceptions of astronomic phenomena. Vosniadou (1992) and his co-workers have shown that the


conceptions held by preschoolers and even by children starting primary school differ significantly from adults’ knowledge of these questions. For example these conceptions, which are based on everyday observations, consist of believing that the earth is flat, situated at the centre of the universe and that it is larger than the sun. These models possess deep roots and when adults provide the correct information concerning these questions, children initially respond by constructing compromise solutions (synthetic models) which integrate the data underlying adult knowledge and the beliefs inherent in their own models. Thus being exposed to precise information is not sufficient to provoke the assimilation of this information. For example, of 54 9-year-old children who were unaware of the correct explanation of the day-night cycle, only two modified their initial model after reading an explanatory text on this subject. This all provides evidence in support of Piaget’s belief that knowledge is assimilated into subjects’ conceptual frameworks and that these frameworks undergo progressive restructuring. Method and Population Spontaneous representation of the origin of the universe This part of the experiment started by familiarizing the subject with the material by means of the following questions: ‘Have you already seen the sky at night? What’s it like?’ ‘Have you noticed that some stars make shapes, constellations, for example the Great Bear?’ ‘Has anyone told you at home or at school or have you seen anything on TV about the universe and what it was like long ago?’ When this phase was concluded, the experimenter posed questions concerning the origin of the universe: ‘Do you think that it has always been like you see it now?’ If the reply is negative: ‘What do you think it was like?’ And irrespective of whether the reply is positive or negative: ‘Do you think it was like that as far back in time as you can go?’ ‘Did the universe have a beginning?’ Graphic representation of the future and origin of a group of stars The subjects were presented with two pictures which were said to portray a segment of the sky as it is seen today and as it was in the days of the earliest humans (see figure 4.3). These two pictures made it possible to deduce the expansionary movement of the universe: in the picture of the present state (picture a) the stars were smaller, less numerous and were further away from one another than in the picture of the earlier state (picture b). The children were asked to describe the differences between the two drawings and questioning continued until they pointed out that the stars were further apart in drawing a than in drawing b.


• Picture of the future. A mask was placed over drawing 4.3b and the children were asked to draw what they thought the group of stars would look like in a million years. • Picture of origin. The subjects were asked to draw the same group of stars as they were at the beginning of the universe. The method included other elements which I shall not describe here since the results obtained will not be presented in the current work. Population It comprised 60 children aged 7 to 12 years, divided into five age-groups: 7 years (from 7:9 to 8:5, M=7:11), 8 years (8:1 to 9:3, M=8:9), 9 years (9:4 to 10:3, M =9:9), 10 years (10:4 to 11:4, M=10:9) and 11 years (11:3 to 12:2, M=11:8). Results Spontaneous conceptions of the beginning of the universe When questioned about the origin of the universe, the majority of children, with the exception of the 9-year-old group, thought that there had been a beginning. A third of the 8-year-old subjects and half of the 9-year-olds thought that the sky was unchanging and had no definite origin. Only one quarter of the 9-year-old subjects stated that the universe had a beginning and another quarter said that they did not know. The idea that there was no beginning to the universe was only rarely encountered among the 10- to 12-year-old children: only 17 per cent of the 10-year-olds and 8 per cent of the 11- and 12-year-olds thought in this way. Of the 43 subjects who thought that the universe had a beginning, almost half did not refer to a formative process. Most of them did not give any explanation (15 subjects) and the others provided a non-causal description (reference to ‘someone’ or God as the creator of the universe or description of a universe emerging from nothing: ‘First there was nothing, then the stars came’). These responses were not characteristic of any particular age-group. In contrast with these types of answers, we can identify two response types which refer to a formative process: allusions to an initial explosion (corresponding more or less to the adult model) and original explanations in terms of an elementary physical or biological process. The following are two examples of the ‘big bang’ type of explanation: • ‘The planets exploded and others were made’ (12-year-old subject). • ‘A block exploded. The bits joined together and that made the planets’ (11year-old subject).


Figure 4.3: Drawings of the sky as it is seen today (drawing a) and as it was seen ‘from the same place at the time of the first humans’ (drawing b).


One subject, aged 10, provided another explanation which corresponds to scientific theories: • ‘Gases formed the stars.’ The following examples are illustrative of the ‘physical process’ type of explanation (children’s original theories): • ‘Things formed the stars’ (9-year-old subject). • ‘One ball gets joined up then another ball and that’s what makes the stars’ (8year-old subject). • ‘Bits get loose from the craters on the moon and make the stars’ (11-year-old subject). We also encountered explanations in terms of an initial collision. These may be distorted assimilations of the big bang theory: • ‘Balls crash into one another and the bits get stuck together’ (10-year-old subject). • ‘Asteroids come from other galaxies. They bump into one another’ (10-year-old subject). Finally, here are two examples of explanations in terms of ‘biological processes’: • ‘After they are born, the stars grow and become planets’ (11-year-old subject). • ‘The earth forms, the sky and the stars form at the same time and get bigger’ (11-year-old subject). Table 4.4 shows the distribution of the principal explanatory categories. It does not present all the results obtained for the 9-year-olds given the very low number of responses affirming that the universe had a beginning. Allusions to an initial explosion, which were probably derived from explanations heard concerning the big bang, did not appear until the age of 10 and were encountered in three children of ages 10 and 11 (about a third of the subjects of this age claiming that the universe had a beginning) and five subjects at age 12 (45 per cent of those who believed that the universe had a beginning). It should be noted that these five subjects were the only ones to provide an explanation of the beginning of the universe. These children provided no explanations whatsoever in terms of physical or biological processes. However, such explanations were also far from frequent in the other groups (two to four subjects per age-group, that is to say 25–40 per cent of the subjects who asserted that the universe had a beginning). Several of the 10-year-old subjects provided a variety of response types involving processes or references to adult models.


Table 4.4: Explanation of the origin of the universe. Number of subjects per age-group (N = 12 subjects per group) and type of response

Note: *Only three subjects affirm the existence of the beginning. Three others don’t know

A comparison of the number of explanations of the beginning of the universe in terms of an adult or the child’s own model with the number of responses which claimed that the universe had a beginning but failed to explain this origin yields the following results. At age 8, a clear majority of subjects did not explain their response (six against two). At the age of 10, the opposite is true with seven subjects providing an explanation as against three who did not. In the 11- and 12year-old groups, the proportions of responses containing an explanation was about 50 per cent. Thus children in their fourth year of primary schooling indisputably tended to refer to a formative process. This tendency could be seen even more clearly .if we take account of the total number of responses since certain subjects provided more than one response. Representations of the future and origin of the universe If we consider both the comments provided by the children and the pictures they drew to represent the sky as it would be a million years from now and as it was at the beginning of the universe we can group the responses into five categories. The first category is that of linear development which takes account of criteria which evolve in different directions. In the pictures which were shown to the children, change over time was illustrated by two criteria whose value falls as development progresses within a given area and an unchanging configuration: the number of stars and their size. In effect, the picture of the sky today contained fewer stars (because they were further apart), each of which was smaller than the corresponding star in the picture representing the past appearance of the sky. In contrast, there was one criterion whose value increased as the system developed: this was the distance between the stars. If the child’s drawings of the future and origin of the universe took account of this twofold evolution (for example, fewer stars and greater distance between them for the future state) they are classed in the ‘linear evolution’ category. This means that


the children have abstracted the criteria of time-related change which are contained in our pictures and that they take account of them despite the relative difficulty of making sense of criteria which evolve in opposite directions (both increasing and diminishing). To summarize, the drawings of the future which testified to a linear conception of evolution presented a greater distance between the stars, a smaller number of stars and/or stars of a smaller size. In the case of the origin of the universe the opposite was true: smaller distance between the stars, more stars and/or larger stars. The second category of representations was the covariation of the criteria. The children changed the spacing between the stars in the same direction as changes in number or size of stars. For example, the drawing of the future state included more stars, larger stars with a larger distance between them. Responses illustrating the opposite development were also grouped in this category (smaller spacing, size and number). The third category was that of inverted evolution. The children took account of variations in opposite directions but illustrated either a contracted future (smaller distance but larger size and greater number) or an expanded origin (greater distance, but smaller number and size). In the final two categories, the subjects took account of only one criterion, namely the time-related change in the spacing between the stars. We have distinguished between the categories ‘continuous increase of distance’ and ‘inverted development of distance’. In the first category, the distance increases with time whereas in the second the spacing contracts (reduction of distance). Table 4.5 indicates the percentage of responses obtained for the various categories for each age-group. The responses obtained for the future and past have been totalled. Linear evolution accounted for an average of 44 per cent of response at ages 8 and 9 and rose to 70 per cent or more among the 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds. It can thus be seen that some of the young subjects were able to take account of criteria that evolve in different directions within a framework of expansion and that the majority of children aged 10 and more possessed this ability. Responses in the ‘covariation of criteria’ category were rare and appeared more frequently at age 8 than among the later age-groups. Inverted evolution (contraction with time) was encountered even more rarely and was observed only in the 8- and 9-year-old subjects. When only the spacing between the stars varied, the responses, which were relatively infrequent, depicted a continuous increase of distance (‘expansion’). No subject provided a response of the ‘contraction’ type where the spacing evolves in a direction opposite to that indicated in the presented model. In order to determine the proportion of children who took account of the criterion of the progressive change in the distance between the stars over time we considered only this criterion in all the response categories. At all ages, a majority of subjects produced drawings illustrating an increase in distance with


Table 4.5: Representation of the evolution of stars, in the future and at their origin. Percentage of responses per age-group and type of representation (N=24 responses per age-group)

time. In the drawings of the future this was observed in 52 per cent of the 8-yearold subjects, 75 per cent of the 9-year-olds, 100 per cent of the 10- and 12-year-olds and 92 per cent of the 11-year-olds. For the second drawing, namely the one concerning the past, identical proportions were found in the 10- and 12-year-old subjects, whereas the percentage was slightly higher in both the 8-year-olds (75 per cent of subjects drawing smaller distances) and the 9-year-olds (92 per cent). Summary and Conclusions First, these result show us that from the ages of 8 to 12, with the exception of the 9-year-olds, children tend to think that physical objects such as stars possess an origin. It should be noted that both the primitive tendency to explain things on the basis of a model of manufactured items or living beings and scientific theories agree on the fact that stars have an origin. Despite this, a third of the 8-year-old children and half of the 9-year-olds thought the sky has always looked as it does now. The generalization of the idea that apparently immutable things have an origin thus appears at the same age as the emergence of an advanced type of diachronic thinking, that is to say, at about the age of 10. Some of the children who believed that the universe had an origin provided no explanation of this origin. This was true of the majority of children at the age of 8 or 9 (75 per cent) and half of the subjects at 11 and 12. Summary explanations were proposed by a quarter of the younger children and by half of the 11- and 12year-olds. It is among the 10-year-olds that we find the greatest proportion of summary explanations of the beginnings of the universe. This result, which may appear surprising at first, may be explained in the following manner: thanks to the development of diachronic thinking, 10-year-old children have little difficulty in representing transformations over time and attempt to explain the succession of states of an evolutive phenomenon. In this respect they do not


differ from older children. It is possible to hypothesize that, unlike the older children, the 10-year-old children are easily able to assimilate unobservable facts and adult explanations into familiar schemata and theories. At the age of 11 or 12 they are probably more aware of the gap between scientific theories and everyday representations and this results in a slight fall in the number of explanations provided. The children of the oldest group studied in this experiment refused to apply a familiar schema to the question of the origin of the universe: they have either assimilated adult theories or they have decided not to provide an explanation. This provides a compelling argument in support of the idea that there is an internal restructuring of theories of time-related change as a result of the development of diachronic thinking. When we examine the question of the explanation of the beginning of the universe we find that 10-year-old children differ significantly from younger subjects in that they tend to provide an explanation. However, this explanation does not always correspond to what they have learned and may sometimes constitute an original model (such as the idea of stars that grow or balls that crash together and stick or meteorites that fall from the craters on the moon). It is likely that such models represent compromises between simple theories derived from the observation of everyday phenomena (the agglutination of matter, division, growth) and explanations provided by adults in a way that resembles the synthetic models proposed by Vosniadou (1992). In general, preadolescents either invoke models provided by adults or are careful to avoid providing explanations of phenomena which they are unable to observe or comprehend. The progress made by 10-year-old children in the field of representing time-related changes leads them to explain the origins of such changes without differentiating clearly between adult models derived from scientific knowledge and familiar explanatory schemata. Essentially, the second part of this experiment tells us that children find it easy to extract and generalize the spatial and numerical criteria of time-related change. They were presented with two pictures which depict the expansionary movement of the stars by means of three criteria: while the configuration remains unchanged, the distance between the stars increases and, as a consequence, the number of stars present in a given area falls and the size of the stars also diminishes. In their drawings of future and past states, the majority of 10-year-old and older children (more than 70 per cent) reproduce at least two of these criteria which vary in opposite directions. For example, when they draw the sky as they imagine it will be in a million years they increase the distance between the stars from the value indicated in the drawing of the sky as it is at present and they reduce the size and number of the stars or, at the very least, they take account of one of these two criteria. A non-negligeable proportion of 8- and 9-year-old children do likewise: 50 per cent and 38 per cent respectively. It can thus be seen that children of school age are able to abstract developmental criteria from representations of change (and observations of


change where these are possible) and apply them to the representation of new changes. This ability can be observed even when two or three criteria, whose values change in opposite directions, are involved. It should be noted that the criteria presented here are numerical and spatial in nature. Other developmental criteria might prove to be more difficult to abstract and even more difficult to apply. In contrast, if subjects are asked to consider only one criterion (in our experiment, an increase in the distance between the elements) success is achieved earlier and is more generalized. In all case, success is achieved more frequently in the groups aged 10 and above than in the 8- and 9-year-old groups. Here we find once more, both for the representation of the expansion of the universe and for that of its origin, that behaviour undergoes a change at about the age of 10. Even though the children are asked to perform a task which is based on knowledge which is unfamiliar to them we can still identify a development of diachronic thinking which follows a similar curve (here it occurs slightly earlier) to that obtained for representations of familiar phenomena. General Conclusions to Chapter 4 Although it is not possible here to expound a number of general conclusions concerning the relationship between diachronic thinking and causal explanations since this would require us to develop our investigation of this field somewhat further, we may nevertheless point to certain consequences of the two experiments presented in this chapter. When presented with physical phenomena, such as those of a biological nature, young schoolchildren of 7 to 8 years are able to identify the spatial and numerical criteria of time-related change. They are also able to use these criteria in their depictions of the earlier or later states of an evolutive phenomenon. Another ability, which appears at an even earlier age, relates to the comprehension of the relation between cause and effect which is essentially based on relations of temporal succession. This comprehension requires only a very elementary level of diachronic thinking. To this end it is sufficient to apprehend the order of temporal succession of a very small number of events and the human mind manifests this ability at a very early age. However, we have already seen that the ability to perceive, reconstruct or predict a succession of states does not necessarily imply the adoption of a diachronic approach. It is possible to represent a succession of states to oneself without understanding the links which make them into a single evolutive process. Thus, for example, the pictures drawn by children up to the age of 10 to depict the thawing of a block of ice are snapshots of a change and not the steps of a process since the children believe that it is necessary to change the number of pictures as a function of the time the ice takes to thaw. Moreover, the type S2 scenarios concerning Babar and Céleste tell us that while children of age 7 and 8 are able to imagine the


successive stages of a causal process, they tend to explain a particular stage in terms of its context rather than by what happened at an earlier stage. Causal explanations develop considerably when, at about the age of 11, children not only introduce links between a number of successive stages but are also able to account for two temporal progressions simultaneously: that relating to the cause and that relating to the effect. It is not until this point that the development of diachronic thinking permits children to understand a whole set of phenomena having persistent causes and delayed effects. The experiment into children’s conceptions of the beginnings of the universe also testifies to a correlation between the progress of diachronic thinking, from 10 years onwards, and the tendency to explain the origin of things, even if they cannot be observed, in terms of familiar schemata of transformation or by starting to integrate adult theories. In my opinion, these transformations are not due to the fact that children of this age have heard adult theories as the majority of the explanations provided by 10-year-old children fail to reproduce adult models. The results presented here can be better explained by the hypothesis of progress in the ability to ‘think of things in time’ which allows children to construct explanations of the origins of things and to start integrating the models supplied by adults. In conclusion, if we are to understand all the components of causal explanation in adults and its development in children, it is important to take account of the aspect of diachronic reasoning. To define causality as the simple succession of cause and effect, as has been done for centuries, is to reduce considerably the complexity of causal reasoning.

Chapter 5 Children as Budding Developmental Psychologists

Genetic psychology, together with its latest offshoot, developmental psychology, has researched the evolution of children’s knowledge in a number of fields. For Piaget, the originator of much of this research, the study of children had a dual objective: namely, to observe the development of knowledge and to investigate certain epistemological problems relating to a number of specific fields (Piaget, 1972c). For example, he wanted to determine whether the idea of speed is more fundamental than that of time, whether an essentially perceptual intuition of geometrical ideas exists or else, what might be the relationship between numbers and logical classes. Even if, in general terms, present-day developmental psychology is no longer concerned with these epistemological considerations, it still helps to demonstrate the basis, in children’s thought, of knowledge elements which also form the object of scientific investigation. We thus possess data concerning the foundations of logic, mathematics, geometry, physics, biology etc. A number of works focusing on what is generally termed the ‘theories of mind’ (for a summary, see Bennett, 1993) demonstrate the existence of early elementary psychological knowledge concerning the beliefs, knowledge, desires and intentions of other people. Despite the scale and diversity of their work, developmental psychologists have apparently never enquired about the foundations of their own discipline in the child. The only exception I know of is the study by Flavell and Wellman (1977) showing that from the age of 5 years on, children know that memory abilities increase with age. If from the beginnings of thought, and even more clearly at school age, there exists an embryonic or elementary logic as well as the ability to attribute ideas and feelings to others, why should there not also exist an elementary developmental psychology? This question arose quite naturally as part of the research into diachronic thinking in which we were involved, since the aim of this research is the study of children’s conceptions of evolutive phenomena. We therefore conducted experiments into the way 7- to 11–12-year-old children think of the development of psychological abilities in the fields of drawing, language and intelligence.


In asking children how they think that their knowledge or abilities develop with age we are addressing two aspects of cognition. On the one hand, we are dealing with metacognition (Flavell, 1979), that is to say subjects’ ability to reflect on their own knowledge. Thus in the research presented in this chapter we shall see how children are able to describe their own progress, compare it to that of other children or imagine its origin. Second, the task which we presented to our subjects required the application of a diachronic approach. The children were not, or not simply, required to consider their current abilities. They were also asked to consider them as the result of a development and to produce hypotheses concerning the form of this development. Such hypotheses can only be partially based on observed facts (the behaviour of younger children or the memories of the subject). As our results will show, the reconstruction of the age-related evolution of abilities in three different fields is based on schemes or theories which vary with the child’s level of development. The Artist Depicts his own Progress: Children’s Conceptions of the Development of the Ability to Draw a Human Figure Objectives and Problems Children’s drawing and its development has been studied since at least the beginning of the twentieth century (Stora, 1963). The stages in this development have been described from a variety of perspectives. Luquet (1913) as well as Piaget, Inhelder and Szeminska (I960) and Reith (1990) have analyzed this development in terms of the relative importance of perceptual data and intelligence. Goodenough (1926) and then later Harris (1963) in a revised approach, suggested using the drawing of a human figure as a test of intellectual development, while other researchers such as Goodnow (1990) have focused on such behaviour as a manifestation of the socialization of knowledge. What knowledge do children themselves possess concerning the development of the ability to draw a human figure? We know that such drawings are frequently produced (Harris, 1963). As soon as they go to kindergarten, and later school, or even at home with their own families, these budding artists are able to compare their productions with those of other children. It is, moreover, highly probable that they possess global theories of the progress that comes with age in all fields. Many authors (Goodnow, Wilkins and Dawes, 1986; Hart and GoldinMeadow, 1984; Reith, 1990; Trautner, Lohaus, Sahm and Helbing, 1989) have studied children’s ability to judge the relative age of the creators of drawings of human figures. These studies show that young children (from 4 to 6 years depending on the authors) are easily able to determine the relative level of development of drawings presented to them two at a time. Furthermore, an

CHILDREN AS BUDDING DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGISTS 79

experiment conducted by Goodnow et al. (1986) reveals that if children of 6 or 7 are asked to choose which of a series of drawings they prefer, the criterion which is spontaneously employed by these children is the level of development of the drawing. Such studies investigate children’s recognitive knowledge of the evolution of drawings of human figures. It is one thing to compare two drawings and recognize that one is more or less developed than the other. It is quite another thing to possess a representation or theory concerning the age-related development of the ability to draw a human figure. It is precisely this latter question that Tryphon wished to study as a part of our research into the development of the diachronic approach (Tryphon and Montangero, 1992). Before asking her subjects to seriate a set of drawings in the order of age of the artists she therefore decided to ask them to draw pictures of human figures which would illustrate the successive stages of the ability to draw. The main aim of this research was to study the criteria which children spontaneously apply when accounting for the development of the skill in question. Theoretically there may be very many such criteria: aesthetic quality, relative precision of lines, the more or less realistic nature of the production (that is to say its conformity to observed reality), number of details depicted etc. If the diachronic approach is indeed a generalizable mode of knowledge then we should discover, as in the case of the growth and decay of trees, that the quantitative criteria applied by the youngest subjects give way to qualitative criteria in the older children. This is the first hypothesis that can be verified by this experiment. We also wanted to determine whether our earlier results concerning children’s conception of developmental steps as delineated stages are confirmed or invalidated by this experiment. According to these results, from the age of 11 onwards children represent a state within an evolutive process as a stage which is distinct from the passage of time. Another point on which we wished to focus in this experiment relates to children’s conceptions of the causes of development. In view of our hypothesis that diachronic thinking is a mode of knowledge which is not limited to a particular domain or context, we expected the results concerning the development of drawing ability to resemble those which we obtained in connection with tree disease. Explanations in terms of external factors, given by young children, give way to explanations of change which take account of internal processes at about the age of 10–11. It can be seen that in this experiment concerning drawings of a human figure we are again attempting to define the nature of diachronic thinking in children through a study of the way in which they reconstruct or predict the stages of an evolutive process. However, diachronic thinking is not manifested simply at the level of these reconstructions or predictions. It is also—and perhaps primarily—a type of attitude or tendency of thought which consists of the spontaneous comparison of a current situation with its past or future states. This ‘diachronic tendency’ enables us to understand without hesitation a question concerning the


past development of a present situation. In the experiment concerning drawings of a human figure we were able to study this point by posing the question: ‘Have you always drawn like that?’ If it is not natural for children to integrate a present fact into a lengthy evolutive process then they will find it difficult to understand this question. If, in contrast, their thought is diachronic in nature, they will doubtlessly understand that the question relates to the development of their ability to draw. The final point which we studied in this experiment concerns the relationship between the recognition of the stages involved in the drawing of a human figure and the way in which children conceive of these stages in a drawing. We wanted to see whether the ability to recognize the level of drawing development in a set of drawings which are difficult to place in chronological order evolves in parallel with the ability to represent the development of drawing techniques. To this end, Tryphon selected 12 pictures drawn by children and adolescents and asked her subjects to place them in chronological order. Questions and Population First part: production of drawings Each child was provided with sheets of paper (A5 format), a pencil and an eraser, and was asked: ‘Can you draw a human figure?’ When the drawing was completed, the experimenter asked: ‘Have you always drawn like that?’ If the answer was affirmative, the children were asked whether they used to draw human figures in the same way when they were younger (‘little’). The subjects were then requested to draw a human figure as they used to draw when they were younger. When this second drawing was completed, the experimenter said: ‘I would like you to do as many drawings as necessary to show how your way of drawing has changed over the years, since the age when you started to draw.’ The series of drawings produced usually depicted in a regressive way the transformation of drawing skills: the first drawing produced revealed the current drawing ability of the child and the following drawings depicted preceding levels of this ability, which were more and more elementary. When the series of drawings was completed the child had to say what had changed with the years in his or her way of drawing human figures. The last question dealt with the causes of changes in drawing ability.

CHILDREN AS BUDDING DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGISTS 81

Second part: seriation of drawings The subjects were presented with 12 drawings of human figures produced by children aged from 3 to 12 years. The drawings were presented in a random order and they had to be ordered according to the age of the artist. The 12 drawings illustrated several levels in the development of drawing abilities and some of these levels were represented by more than one drawing. Population This comprised 70 children aged 6 to 12 years: 10 children of 6 years (6:1 to 6: 11, M=6:7) and 12 children of 7 years (7:0 to 7:8, M=7:4), 8 years (8:0 to 8:9, M =8:4), 9 years (9:0 to 9:11, M=9:8), 10 years (10:4 to 10:11, M=10:9) and 11 years (11:0 to 12:0, M=11:6). Results and Discussion Diachronic tendency Let us start with an analysis of the answers to the question: ‘Have you always drawn like that?’ which was asked when the subjects had finished their first drawing of a human figure. Three kinds of responses were observed. • Affirmative. For example: ‘Yes I have always drawn like that.’ Such answers showed that the children had not understood the question properly. They did not take account of the past tense of the verb and the adverb ‘always’, which referred to a distant past, when they were little children. Since they did not tend to think in a diachronic way, the children who gave this type of answer assimilated the question in a distorted way, as if it were: ‘As you are now, do you always draw like that?’ • Negative, near past. Example: ‘No, I can draw different kinds of pictures’ or ‘Sometimes I draw with coloured pencils.’ These answers dealt with what had happened during a limited interval of time, in the near past (or what was likely to happen in the near future), and they took account of possible variations during this period. The children who answered in this way did not understand any more than those who gave affirmative answers that the question referred to their physical and psychological development. • Negative, past. Example: ‘No. When I was little, I used to draw differently.’ Only these answers revealed a developed diachronic tendency, that is the readiness to consider a current state of affairs as a stage in an evolutive process. These answers also resulted from developed metacognitive abilities. On the whole, the children who answered in this way were able to think about their own abilities from a perspective which went beyond the present time and took into account a long past evolution.


Table 5.1: Responses to the question: ‘Have you always drawn like this?’ Percentage of subjects per age-group (6–7 years: N=22, 8–9 years: N=24, 10–11 years: N=24) and type of response

Table 5.1 shows the frequency of these three types of answers in the subjects who were divided into three age-groups. There was a significant variation of answers with age (c2 (4)=43.48, p

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