Effect of Maternal Attitude on Development of Logical Operations

Abstract

A study of the relationship between maternal rejection and the conserving skill was undertaken because it is representative of a whole series of validly predictable interactions and because conservation operations require an early demonstration of the skill of filtering out irrelevant from relevant stimuli and of generating principles of stimulus invariance in the presence of complex misleading cues. It was predicted that the children of rejecting and accepting mothers would differ in their competence in conservation test situations and that the superiority of accepted children would increase with maternal participation in the experiment. A new technique for the measurement of individual differences in conservation was developed. The hypotheses were generally confirmed.