Abstract

This study aimed to examine the development of preschool children's ability to seriate figures and events in different operational conditions such as composition versus insertion and forward versus backward directions. The influences of information processing load of the task, criterion of serration, cue for the formation of seriation rule, and task familiarity were major variables to be examined. Subjects of this study were 168 preschool children of 4, 5, and 6 years of age. 56 children in each age group were randomly assigned to forward composition, forward insertion, backward composition and backward insertion experimental groups. The task used in this study were 10 sets of figures and 10 sets of events. Each Set was composed of 5 pictures that are to be seriated in terms of length, size, and temporal succession. The following results were revealed from this study. First, around the ages of 5 and 6 preschool children acquire the ability of seriation in both figures and events, given tasks with approprate information processing load. Second, at the lower age levels seriation of figures develop earlier than seriation of events. Third, in event task in which the formation of seriation rule is more difficult than that in figure task, the performance level of insertion is higher than that of composition seriation. Fourth, forward seriation develops earlier than backward seriation in both figure and event tasks at lower age levels. However, at the age of 6 at which the seriation is completed the performance difference between the two directions of seriation disappears.