Abstract
The aim of the study is to investigate preschool children's conception of matter, or the naive realism that the mass existing in the outer world which they perceive is considered to be the real matter as it is. Such conception is not necessarily equal to another form of conception directing to the inner structure of the matter.
The present study was designed to verify two fundamental hypotheses proposed as follows;
1) While basing on only the apparent attribute of matter, the preschool children's judgement of weight will remain undifferentiated from that of volume.
2) Preschool children will judge the volume of matter by judgements on the matter's appeal to them. In other words, their judgement of volume will correspond with the degree of their liking for the matter.
The main results obtained from the study, all of which agreed with hypotheses, may be summarized as follows:
1. Ss (3-4 years old) were inclined to judge a bigger ball to be heavier. This might be called the anti-Charpentier's effect. It is satisfactory to assume that their judgement of weight which is based on the apparent weight of matter may cause the anti-Charpentier's effect.
2. Ss (4-5 years old) who said they were fond of cracker judged a cracker to be bigger than a counterfeit cracker made of clay, and overestimated the plane dimensions of the cracker.
97 preschool children (4-5 years old) were assigned to two groups. The first group who said they were fond of chocolate was instructed that a ball shown to them was a chocolate. The other group who said they disliked a bitter drug was instructed that the ball was a bitter pill. The former judged the ball to be bigger than the latter did. Furthermore, the first group overestimated the spherical dimentions of the ball, while the latter underestimated the actual size of the ball.
3. Both a bigger light ball and a smaller heavy one were shown to Ss (4 years old). On perceiving that a bigger one was lighter, the children were lead to the state that they could correctly discriminate between the heavier weight and the lighter weight of two balls irrespective of the apparent volume of each one. In addition to the facts mentioned above, it should be pointed out that their discrimination of weight at this time was influenced by Charpentier's effect.
