FIGURE 20 (S1107M): A pseudoconcept “proper” even when becoming mindful of the totality

The eleven-year-old participant in Figure 20 (S1107M) was the youngest in the study to take into account the implications of his moves in relation to the totality of the blocks. His opening response was to create four groups of shapes, but then he paused before moving the two semi-circles to the group of trapezoids and the two hexagons to the group of circles. His comments about the randomness and differences in shape indicated that he was reluctant to assign the “problem children” to the two groups as he just had. The participant then agreed that we could place the four “problem children” back into the middle of the board for the time being, and when asked what six shapes would do to his approach of shape, he said “It messes it up!”

This was also his response to the approach based on colour, and when after a while I suggested that it had to be something else if not colour or shape, his quirky comment was: “The names on the bottom?” His next idea was height, but this was quickly eliminated because there were only two. My clue of a cev triangle did not help to begin with, until he said “Oh I get it!” and placed a triangle in each corner. When asked how he would continue with this approach because he had paused once again, he said it couldn’t work because there was one triangle too many (there are five triangles). However, the way this participant appeared to move from a consideration of perceptually obvious cues to a contemplation of these in relation to the whole was not always consistent, which is clearly but subtly evident in the lines of reasoning he next applied – classic examples of the pseudoconcept proper.

When a second cev triangle had its name revealed (top left), he decided to move the cev trapezoid next to the two cev triangles: a second later, he removed the trapezoid, and, in response to prompting, said he had put it there because he had thought “it could be size”, but then he had taken it away because “it has its top cut off” (he didn’t appear to be aware that he had suggested in this sequence that shape was his reason for abandoning size). His next move was to try to allocate one trapezoid (there are four, which he counted) per group, and for reasons not explained, he placed the bik trapezoid, not the cev one, with the cev triangles. So, one may ask: “Where is the pseudoconcept?” It is shrewdly camouflaged in the triangles: whether one remembers back that the number of triangles had been established and the approach of one shape per group thus eliminated, or whether one responds to the visual clue of two triangles in one group, one would see either way that the exploration of the triangles would logically prevent the allocation of one shape per group as an approach. A pseudoconceptual insensitivity to this question of the triangles was also accompanied by what appeared to have been a lack of consistently held hierarchy: it was possible that when this participant counted the number of trapezoids his focus on the fact that there were four of them took on a greater significance and, because of this prominence, the unfeasibility of the approach of one shape per group correspondingly receded.