Experimental Analysis of Seriation Mechanisms
Richard M. Young · Birkhäuser Basel eBooks · 1976
This chapter deals with the protocols of a number of children who perform the seriation task correctly. Although they succeed, we shall see that few if any of them follow the operational strategy described in Chapter 1. Instead, they employ a variety of techniques for performing the seriation, and one of the purposes of this chapter is to convey some idea of the range of seriation methods met with in practice. Since these children behave less “algorithmically” than the operational strategy would lead us to expect, many of these protocols will appear “unsystematic” at first sight. Indeed, that observation is correct if by “unsystematic” we mean that a child’s behaviour cannot be adequately captured in a single short phrase such as “repeatedly picking the largest remaining block”. But the behaviour is not haphazard, and one of the merits of PSs is to display clearly the behavioural regularities that underlie the superficial appearance of chaos. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.