It Is All Relative: How Young Children

Two experiments tested the ability of 4- and 8-year-old children to encode the extent of a target dowel and later discriminate between the target and a foil having a novel extent. By manipulating the heights of containers in which we presented the stimuli we tested whether children used the relation between the dowels and containers for encoding extent. We found that 8-year-olds encoded extent without relying on the re-lation between the target dowel and container but 4-year-olds only encoded the extent of the target dowel relative to the container. This early ability to encode extent rela-tive to an aligned standard may serve as a perceptual basis for the developing ability to measure. This article investigates how young children encode and retain information about the extent of a continuous quantity. The ability to determine extent underlies many important cognitive functions recruited in a number of everyday tasks. For exam-ple, identifying an object as one seen earlier or establishing the quantitative equiv-alence in length, area, or volume of different objects requires the ability to encode and represent continuous amount. Although a significant amount of research has focused on the origins of discrete numerical quantification in infancy and early childhood, much less is known about how infants and young children encode infor-mation about continuous quantities. Older children and adults encode and retain information about extent by impos-ing a standard or measure such as a ruler or thumb-length on a target object. Th