Children's judgments of age.

Age judgments of human figures by children, ranging in age from 3 through 9 years, were investigated. The stimuli consisted of 4 different male figures drawn according to typical physical characteristics of the middle-aged adult. adolescent. child, and infant. The figures were reproduced in 2 sizes and were matched in all possible pairings. Ss' accuracy in age judgments increased steadily over the 7 age levels. The errors of young Ss were primarily due to a figural-size response set. Older Ss made increasing use of other physical features in making their judgments. Implications of these findings were discussed with references to the theoretical framework of Piaget. The student of child psychology with an interest in the history of his discipline can rather quickly attest to the fact that many of his early predecessors held rathn peculiar notions as to what the child is all about. From antiquity until up to perhaps the beginning of the 20th century, th<> child was Yicwed more or less as a miniatur<> adult; he was s<>en as 'essentially the same as the adult except that he is smaller, weaker, and a bit more stupid. Not until the child began to be studied by clinical psychologists in the early part of this century did these attitudt>s begin to change. These men, perhaps also guided by the insights of the peripatetic G. Stanley Hall, began to realize that the vnv young human being was a creature \'cry diffcn'nt than the grown-up adult. They thus began the study of the child as a child, an organism unique unto himself, \Vith his own unique forms of psychological functioning. Nevertheless. true understanding of the child was slow to develop in this country. Perhaps this de\-elopmcntal torpidity can be explained by the predominance of the intrepid learning theorists during this period, who studied the learning process in many kinds of organisms, including children, but also operated under the general mental set which assumed that all forms of learning were a matter of S-R connections. The fruit of this line of research was summarized by Norman Munn in Carmichael's ] 95-J. volume, Manual of Child Psych nlogy; Munn concluded, in effect, that there are no learning processes which arc' unique in children, as opposed to animals or adults. \\'ithin recent years there has been an upsurge of what is generally called "cognitive psychology". The unquestioned giant of the cognitive approach to child study is Jean Piaget of Geneva, who has been writing voluminously about the child for 45 years. Only recently has his work been given the attention in this country 1 In"·a State University.