FIGURE 3 (S305F): Pseudoconceptual reasoning within a syncretic representation

The three-year-old participant in Figure 3 (S305F) ignored the instruction to find blocks which could be the same as the mur exemplar and instead constructed a tower built of randomly selected blocks from those which happened to catch her attention. No particular reasons were advanced because building the tower took up a great deal of this participant’s concentration: answering my questions was the least of her concerns – making the blocks balance was. In yet another tower, the base started with the orange blocks, and then the activity of building the tower became more important once again – the selection according to colour was abandoned in favour of randomly selected blocks and efforts to make them balance.

In Figure 3, after correctly naming the blue shapes which she had selected as being the same, this participant (S305F) was asked to find more circles (as colours and shapes featured prominently in the preschool programme). Her reasoning revealed itself to be pseudoconceptual in that it lacked hierarchy and reflected an unstable ability to abstract a particular characteristic consistently: although the participant had placed the three circles together because they were circles, in this photograph she was in the process of removing it from the other circles because “it’s not the same”. For this participant, the colour of the orange circle excluded it from being “the same”, despite the fact that she had been asked to find more circles, not more blue blocks.