We explore a long‐observed phenomenon in children's cognitive development known as size seriation. It is not until children are around 7 years of age that they spontaneously use a strict ascending or descending order of magnitude to organize sets of objects differing in size. Incomplete and inaccurate ordering shown by younger children has been thought to be related to their incomplete grasp of the mathematical concept of a unit. Piaget first brought attention to children's difficulties in solving ordering and size‐matching tests, but his tasks and explanations have been progressively neglected due to major theoretical shifts in scholarship on developmental cognition. A cogent alternative to his account has never emerged, leaving size seriation and related abilities as an unexplained case of discontinuity in mental growth. In this monograph, we use a new training methodology, together with computational modeling of the data to offer a new explanation of size seriation development and the emergence of related skills.

中文翻译：

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大小定序技能的发展：一项实证和计算分析。

我们探索了儿童认知发展中长期观察到的现象，即大小锯齿。直到孩子7岁左右，他们才自发地使用严格的升序或降序来组织大小不同的物体集。年龄较小的孩子表现出的不完整和不正确的排序被认为与他们对单元的数学概念的不完全掌握有关。皮亚杰首先注意到孩子在解决顺序和大小匹配测试中的困难，但是由于关于发展认知的学术方面的重大理论转变，他的任务和解释已被逐渐忽略。从来没有出现过一种有力的替代方法，这使得大小锯齿和相关能力成为无法解释的智力增长中断的案例。