Purpose of study was: (1) to obtain data in a cultural setting concerning the ability of children to conserve weight at the point of transition from primary to secondary education; and (2) to explore the relationship between performance or reasoning tasks of the kind employed in nonverbal psychometric tests and the presence or absence of ability…

Analyzes cognitive developmental changes in the use of a convention for measurement among New Guinea's Oksapmin people. A total of 103 individuals (including unschooled children, unschooled adults, second-grade children, and sixth-grade adolescents) were administered three types of tasks assessing ability to compare lengths. (Author/RH)

Two studies indicate that Oksapmin children progress from premediational to mediational phases in their use of body parts to compare and reproduce number and that this change generally occurs prior to the development of concepts of number conservation. A third study shows that this general change is manifested in culturally specific ways.…

Reported are the results of an experiment in which twelve different conservation of length tasks, indicative of passage from Piaget's pre-operational to concrete operations stages of cognitive development, were administered to a sample of individuals from Imbonggu-speaking people, a remote and traditional society in Papua New Guinea. Individuals…