Performance on Donaldson and McGarrigle's “Cars and Garages” Task as Evidence About the Reasons for Failure on Piaget's Number-Conservation Task

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Abstract Piaget attributed young children's failure on the number conservation task to the fact that they lack the concept involved. An alternative hypothesis is that the failure is caused by misinterpretation of the question asked. The “cars and garages” or “covering” task is similar to the conservation task except in the transformation employed: instead of changing the length of one of the rows of objects, the experimenter introduces a new, misleading feature. Children's performance on the covering task has been adduced as evidence against Piaget's position and for (one form of) the misinterpretation hypothesis. Three experiments employing (mainly) 4-year-old children compared the difficulty of the conservation and covering tasks. The first study used “equality” versions of the tasks; the second, “inequality” versions. The third study used a covering task in which the misleading cue had been rendered particularly salient. In each case, the covering task was found to be significantly easier than the cons...