FIGURE 18 (S1102F): A (classical) pseudoconcept within a diffuse complex

The eleven-year-old participant in Figure 18 (S1102F) started by asking about the number of blocks per group while she was selecting all the triangles as possible candidates for the mur group. After adding the last triangle – a yellow cev – she also added the yellow bik trapezoid and said that she couldn’t find any more blocks to add. Then, she spent several more minutes moving trapezoids and triangles in and out of the group, and in her explanation for this diffuse group she had noted height and shape, but then she said that the blocks in this group “seemed to fit in… a lucky guess”. She then created another group of all the circles which she said “felt a lot easier… because they’re all kind of circles”.

The photograph in Figure 18 was taken six minutes into the session, and a combination of the instability and fluidity of the diffuse complex, as well as a pseudoconceptual (preconceptual) disregard for inconsistencies became obvious. After she had created the group of circles, she chose to turn over the green lag triangle – “Woo!” she said. When prompted to explain a little more about the meaning of “Woo”, she promptly took all of the unturned triangles out of the mur group and put them into the lag group (bottom right). Without paying any attention to the implication of the triangular mur exemplar, she went on to create the group of squares (top right), yet it was the “left-over” blocks in the middle which resulted in her being “Stuck” (rather than the incompatibility of an approach based on shape that was quite clearly obvious in the two upturned triangles with their names revealed).

As her session continued, quite apart from the pseudoconceptual insistence on shape, and the fluid abandoning of colour (apparently abandoned when moving semi-circles and hexagons between two groups), this participant demonstrated a pseudoconceptual disregard for the need to have consistently applied principles for sorting the four groups. By her thirteenth modification move, where she had tried out and repeated various diffuse combinations of colour and shape, she created three groups on the basis of height and one group on size. This grouping was then modified to be based on height and “flat sides”.