12 oz. Can or 12 oz. bottle

Last year my roommate and I were going to Safeway to get some beer for the weekend. We got to the beer aisle and being the frugal college students that we are we spent some time scanning the variety of brewers and prices we had to choose from. Eventually we settled on Coors, I reached for the 24-pack of cans for 20 bucks, and he reached for the 18-pack of bottles for 19 bucks. When I asked him what he was doing he replied, “Well I know that case has more cans, but there’s more beer in these bottles.” The point I’m trying to highlight is that I feel there is an over estimation of our own abilities. Why do you think really expensive Vodkas come in really tall, thin containers? What the conservation tasks demonstrate is simply that the children who fail at this do not have a conceptual understanding or schema to deal with what is being asked of them. When they hear more, they may simply think taller. From the Human Performance class, we know that we are most accurate at making a decision about the respective lengths of two lines that start at the same datum. Next is comparing two lines that are not lined up on one end. It turns out that making comparisons between both volumes and areas is something that most of us are terrible at. It’s something that we develop over years of observation, so it seems silly to me to be surprised when a child makes this mistake. The visual cliff is the most compelling evidence to me that children learn through their observations. Let’s think about what a baby sees for the first time. They lie on their backs and observe things floating in and out of there visual field. As adults we have a clear concept of up and down, because we spend the majority of waking life in one orientation. Things fall from top to bottom in our visual field. But a baby observes a mobile that is suspended in its field, nothing above or below it. Adult’s faces come at them from all angles, attached to bodies that extend out of their few, and when they turn to watch them walk away they see something contacting the ground (which is there visual side). Occlusion and continuity are simply the first things that they have any chance of understanding. When a baby begins to sit itself up, and learn that is how it needs to be oriented t move, it then can begin to understand concepts like support and physical laws like gravity. If I was carried everywhere on my side, held upside down, and tossed in the air, I’d be pretty confused as to which way things where supposed to happen too. The assumption may be made that we have a kinesthetic sense that tells us which way is up, and we do, but it’s very easy to confuse. When pilots come into bad whether and they no longer have readily available cues to orient them to what their pitch is, if they don’t know how to fly by there gauges they will enter a state of vertigo and fly there planes straight into the ground. I don’t think that the assumption should be made that babies have innate understandings, or a naïve sense of physics. Just because they demonstrate an ability to be more interested in the things that they have the ability to perceive doesn’t mean that they where born with those abilities. It’s kind of a stretch but I think our dreams are a good example of this. When I was young I remember flying and doing amazing things in my dreams all the times. There were huge monsters to run away from. I even had a dream with the Young Looney Tunes, cartoon colors and all. Well now I know I can’t fly, so I don’t fly any more. I’ve never had the experience of actually being chased by a monster so that doesn’t happen anymore either. About the worst thing that happens in my dreams now is a horrible breakup or waking up in a dream and realizing I hadn’t written a term paper. Still pretty scary, but they all hold to the physics I’ve come to understand after 21 years.