According to Piaget's Genevan colleagues,Inhelder, B., Sinclair, H., & Bovet, M. Learning and the development of cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974 the "semilogic" of these order functions sustains the preoperational child's ability to use of spatial extent to index and compare quantities. The child, for example, could use the length of an array to index the number of objects in the array. Thus, the child would judge the longer of two arrays as having the greater number of objects. Although imperfect, such comparisons are often fair ("semilogical") substitutes for exact quantification. Furthermore, these order functions underlie the child's rudimentary knowledge of environmental regularities. Young children are capable of constructing—this reflects the constructivist bent of Piaget's work—sequences of objects of alternating color. They also have an understanding of the pairwise exchanges of cards having pictures of different flowers.
According to Piaget's Genevan colleagues,Inhelder, B., Sinclair, H, & Bovet, M. Learning and the development of cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974 the "semilogic" of these order functions sustains the preoperational child's ability to use of spatial extent to index and compare quantities. The child, for example, could use the length of an array to index the number of objects in the array. Thus, the child would judge the longer of two arrays as having the greater number of objects. Although imperfect, such comparisons are often fair ("semilogical") substitutes for exact quantification. Furthermore, these order functions underlie the child's rudimentary knowledge of environmental regularities. Young children are capable of constructing—this reflects the constructivist bent of Piaget's work—sequences of objects of alternating color. They also have an understanding of the pairwise exchanges of cards having pictures of different flowers.