hard, or the clouds are white because someone painted them that color. Finally, precausal thinking is categorized by transductive reasoning. Transductive reasoning is when a child fails to understand the true relationships between cause and effect. Unlike deductive or inductive reasoning (general to specific, or specific to general), transductive reasoning refers to when a child reasons from specific to specific, drawing a relationship between two separate events that are otherwise unrelated. For example, if a child hears the dog bark and then a balloon popped, the child would conclude that because the dog barked, the balloon popped. Intuitive thought substage A main feature of the pre-operational stage of development is primitive reasoning. Between the ages of four and seven, reasoning changes from symbolic thought to intuitive thought. This stage is "marked by greater dependence on intuitive thinking rather than just perception." Children begin to have more automatic thoughts that don’t require evidence. During this stage there is a heightened sense of curiosity and need to understand how and why things work. Piaget named this substage "intuitive thought" because they are starting to develop more logical thought but cannot explain their reasoning. Thought during this stage is still immature and cognitive errors occur. Children in this stage depend on their own subjective perception of the object or event. This stage is characterized by centration, conservation, irreversibility, class inclusion, and transitive inference. Centration is the act of focusing all attention on one characteristic or dimension of a situation, whilst disregarding all others. Conservation is the awareness that altering a substance's appearance does not change its basic properties. Children at this stage are unaware of conservation and exhibit centration. Both centration and conservation can be more easily understood once familiarized with Piaget's most famous experimental task. In this task, a child is presented with two identical beakers containing the same amount of liquid. The child usually notes that the beakers do contain the same amount of liquid. When one of the beakers is poured into a taller and thinner container, children who are younger than seven or eight years old typically say that the two beakers no longer contain the same amount of liquid, and that the taller container holds the larger quantity (centration), without taking into consideration the fact that both beakers were previously noted to contain the same amount of liquid. Due to superficial changes, the child was unable to comprehend