they strongly suggest that cognitive skills’ training is appropriate during this period of development.
We found that most children succeed in different training tasks, even when excluding the possibility
of (correct) random responding.
As the children could easily identify the size of the animal stimulus, we may assume that inaccuracies
in self-identification might be explained by factors other than limited cognitive abilities. This observation has been made in
previous work by Lerner and Gellert (1969) who found that 5-year old participants who failed to accurately assess their own body were still able to correctly identify the body size of other children.
Work by White, Mauro, and Spindler (1985) support these findings.
They found that children were able to match other children of different weights (body type).
However, as we did not use these authors’ strategies and noting that our animal stimulus task is a simple matching task that might be less complex than asking the child to identify the representation of his or her own body, we remain cautious about how these findings demonstrate a presence of the cognitive skills necessary for self-identification at this stage
of development.