Transfer in Young Children's Understanding of Spatial Representations

The creative and flexible use of symbols is a unique human ability. In order to use a symbol, one must understand the basic relation between the symbol and what it represents. How do young children come to appreciate such relations? One possibility is that insight into one symbolic relation helps children appreciate different ones. The 3 studies presented here support this possibility. In Experiments 1 and 2, both 2.5- and 3.0-year-old children showed transfer from an easy task that required appreciation of a model-room symbolic relation to a more difficult one, one that children their age typically do not appreciate. In Experiment 3, 2.5-year-olds showed transfer between symbol types: Experience with a model-room relation helped them appreciate a map-room relation. These transfer effects are consistent with the claim that early experience with symbolic relations contributes to symbolic sensitivity, a basic readiness to recognize that one object or event may stand for another.     

Early Deception and the Child's Theory of Mind: False Trails and Genuine Markers

The ability to understand false beliefs is critical to a concept of mind. Chandler, Fritz, and Hala challenge recent claims that this ability emerges only at around 4 years of age. They report that 2- and 3-year-olds remove true trails and lay false ones to mislead someone about the location of a hidden object. Experiment 1 confirmed that 2- and 3-year-olds produce apparently deceptive ploys, but they produce them less often than 4-year-olds, require prompting, and rarely anticipate their impact on the victim's beliefs or search. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that 3-year-olds produce deceptive and informative ploys indiscriminately, whether asked to mislead a competitor or inform a collaborator. By contrast, 4-year-olds act selectively. The results support earlier claims that an understanding of false beliefs and deceptive ploys emerges at around 4 years of age. 2- and 3-year-olds can be led to produce such ploys but show no clear understanding of their effect.     

Children's understanding of the distinction between real and apparent emotion

2 experiments examined children's understanding of the distinction between real and apparent emotion. In Experiment 1, 6- and 10-year-old children listened to stories in which it would be appropriate for the story protagonist to feel either a positive or negative emotion but to hide that emotion. Subjects were asked to say both how the protagonist would look and how the protagonist would really feel, and to justify their claims. The results indicated that 6- and 10-year-olds alike could distinguish quite accurately between real and apparent emotion, although 10-year-olds were somewhat better at justifying this distinction. In Experiment 2, a slightly modified procedure was used to test 4- and 6-year-olds. Again, 6-year-olds demonstrated their grasp of the difference between real and apparent emotion, and even 4-year-olds showed a limited grasp of the distinction. The findings are discussed in relation to recent research concerning children's concept of mind, their grasp of the appearance-reality distinction, their ability to produce complex, embedded justifications, and their ideas about emotion.     

Children's suggestibility in relation to their understanding about sources of knowledge

In the experiments reported here, children chose either to maintain their initial belief about an object's identity or to accept the experimenter's contradicting suggestion. Both 3- to 4-year-olds and 4- to 5-year-olds were good at accepting the suggestion only when the experimenter was better informed than they were (implicit source monitoring). They were less accurate at recalling both their own and the experimenter's information access (explicit recall of experience), though they performed well above chance. Children were least accurate at reporting whether their final belief was based on what they were told or on what they experienced directly (explicit source monitoring). Contrasting results emerged when children decided between contradictory suggestions from two differentially informed adults: Three- to 4-year-olds were more accurate at reporting the knowledge source of the adult they believed than at deciding which suggestion was reliable. Decision making in this observation task may require reflective understanding akin to that required for explicit source judgments when the child participates in the task.     

There's More to the Picture Than Meets the Eye: Young Children's Difficulty Understanding Biased Interpretation

5 experiments investigated children's understanding that expectations based on prior experience may influence a person's interpretation of ambiguous visual information. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds were asked to infer a puppet's interpretation of a small, ambiguous portion of a line drawing after the puppet had been led to have an erroneous expectation about the drawing's identity. Children of both ages failed to ascribe to the puppet an interpretation consistent with the puppet's expectation. Instead, children attributed complete knowledge of the drawing to the puppet. In Experiment 2, the task was modified to reduce memory demands, but 4- and 5-year-olds continued to overlook the puppet's prior expectations when asked to infer the puppet's interpretation of an ambiguous scene. 6-year-olds responded correctly. In Experiment 3, 4- and 5-year-olds correctly reported that an observer who saw a restricted view would not know what was in the drawing, but children did not realize that the observer's interpretation might be mistaken. Experiments 4 and 5 explored the possibility that children's errors reflect difficulty inhibiting their own knowledge when responding. The results are taken as evidence that understanding of interpretation begins at approximately age 6 years.     

Emergence of graphic symbol functioning and the question of domain specificity: a longitudinal training study

The impact of social scaffolding on the emergence of graphic symbol functioning was explored in a longitudinal training study. Links among graphic, language, and play domains in symbolic development were also investigated. The symbolic functioning of 16 children, who were 28 months at the outset of the study, was assessed in comprehension and production tasks across the three domains at monthly intervals from 28 to 36 months, and again at 42 months. Training was delivered in between monthly assessments during weekly visits. Half of the children received training, which consisted of the experimenter drawing common objects and highlighting the relation between pictures and their referents, for 16 consecutive weeks early in the study (early training, ET). The remaining half received a placebo version of training for these 16 weeks, followed by actual training for 4 weeks in the fifth month (late training, LT). After the first 4 months of training the ET group was found to have accelerated comprehension and production of graphic symbols relative to the LT group. After the fifth month, the LT group reached the same level of graphic symbol performance as the ET group. There were strong positive correlations found among graphic symbol functioning and language and play, and between play and language. These findings support the view that graphic symbolic development can be influenced by cultural scaffolding, that more extensive training is needed early rather than later in development, and that interrelationships exist among symbolic domains.     

Searching and planning: young children's reasoning about past and future event sequences

Six experiments examined children's ability to make inferences using temporal order information. Children completed versions of a task involving a toy zoo; one version required reasoning about past events (search task) and the other required reasoning about future events (planning task). Children younger than 5 years failed both the search and the planning tasks, whereas 5-year-olds passed both (Experiments 1 and 2). However, when the number of events in the sequence was reduced (Experiment 3), 4-year-olds were successful on the search task but not the planning task. Planning difficulties persisted even when relevant cues were provided (Experiments 4 and 5). Experiment 6 showed that improved performance on the search task found in Experiment 3 was not due to the removal of response ambiguity.     

Children's thinking about counterfactuals and future hypotheticals as possibilities

Two experiments explored whether children's correct answers to counterfactual and future hypothetical questions were based on an understanding of possibilities. Children played a game in which a toy mouse could run down either 1 of 2 slides. Children found it difficult to mark physically both possible outcomes, compared to reporting a single hypothetical future event, "What if next time he goes the other way ..." (Experiment 1: 3-4-year-olds and 4-5-year-olds), or a single counterfactual event, "What if he had gone the other way ...?" (Experiment 2: 3-4-year-olds and 5-6-year-olds). An open counterfactual question, "Could he have gone anywhere else?," which required thinking about the counterfactual as an alternative possibility, was also relatively difficult.     

Children's understanding of the distinction between intentions and desires

Much of the previous research on children's understanding of intentions confounded intentions with desires. Intentions and desires are different, in that a desire can be satisfied in a number of ways, but an intention must be satisfied by carrying out the intended action. Children 3 through 7 years of age and adults were presented with situations in which intentions were satisfied but desires were not, or vice versa, in a story-comprehension task (N = 71) and a target-hitting game (N = 45). Although 3- and 4-year-olds were unable to differentiate desires and intentions consistently, 5- and 7-year-olds often matched the adult pattern. Younger children's difficulties in understanding intentions are discussed in terms of their use of a desire-outcome matching strategy and the representational complexities of intentions.     

The role of intentionality and iconicity in children's developing comprehension and production of cartographic symbols

The contribution of intentionality understanding to symbolic development was examined. Actors added colored dots to a map, displaying either symbolic or aesthetic intentions. In Study 1, most children (5–6 years) understood actors' intentions, but when asked which graphic would help find hidden objects, most selected the incorrect (aesthetic) one whose dot color matched referent color. On a similar task in Study 2, 5- and 6-year-olds systematically picked incorrectly, 9- and 10-year-olds picked correctly, and 7- and 8-year-olds showed mixed performance. When referent color matched neither symbolic nor aesthetic dot colors, children performed better overall, but only the oldest children universally selected the correct graphic and justified choices with intentionality. Results bear on theory of mind, symbolic understanding, and map understanding.     

Preschool Children's Symbolic Representation of Objects through Gestures

To investigate the symbolic quality of preschoolers' gestural representations in the absence of real objects, 48 children (16 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) performed 2 tasks. In the first task, they were asked to pretend to use 8 common objects (e.g., "pretend to brush your teeth with a toothbrush"). There was an age-related progression in the symbolic quality of gestural representations. 3- and 4-year-olds used mostly body part gestures (e.g., using an extended finger as the toothbrush), whereas 5-year-olds used imaginary object gestures (e.g., pretending to hold an imaginary toothbrush). To determine if children's symbolic skill is sufficiently flexible to allow them to use gestures other than those spontaneously produced in the first task, in the second task children were asked to imitate, for each object, a gesture modeled by an experimenter. The modeled gesture was different from the one the child performed on the first task (e.g., if the child used a body part gesture to represent a particular object, the experimenter modeled an imaginary object gesture for that object). Ability to imitate modeled gestures was positively related to age but was also influenced by the symbolic mode of gesture. 3-year-olds could not imitate imaginary object gestures as well as body part gestures, suggesting that young preschoolers have difficulty performing symbolic acts that exceed their symbolic level even when the acts are modeled. Results from both tasks provide strong evidence for a developmental progression from concrete body part to more abstract imaginary object gestural representations during the preschool years.     

Piecing Together the Puzzle of Pictorial Representation: How Jigsaw Puzzles Index Metacognitive Development

Jigsaw puzzles are ubiquitous developmental toys in Western societies, used here to examine the development of metarepresentation. For jigsaw puzzles this entails understanding that individual pieces, when assembled, produce a picture. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 117) completed jigsaw puzzles that were normal, had no picture, or comprised noninterlocking rectangular pieces. Pictorial puzzle completion was associated with mental and graphical metarepresentational task performance. Guide pictures of completed pictorial puzzles were not useful. In Experiment 2, 3- to 4-year-olds (N = 52) completed a simplified task, to choose the correct final piece. Guide-use associated with age and specifically graphical metarepresentation performance. We conclude that the pragmatically natural measure of jigsaw puzzle completion ability demonstrates general and pictorial metarepresentational development at 4 years.     

The development of the ability to recognize the meaning of iconic signs

Early developmental psychologists viewed iconic representation as cognitively less complex than other forms of symbolic thought. It is therefore surprising that iconic signs are not acquired more easily than arbitrary signs by young language learners. One explanation is that children younger than 3 years have difficulty interpreting iconicity. The current study assessed hearing children's ability to interpret the meaning of iconic signs. Sixty-six 2.5- to 5-year-olds who had no previous exposure to signs were required to match iconic signs to pictures of referents. Whereas few of the 2.5-year-olds recognized the meaning of the iconic signs consistently, more than half of the 3.0-year-olds and most of 3.5-year-olds performed above chance. Thus, the ability to recognize the meaning of iconic signs gradually develops during the preschool years. Implications of these findings for sign language development, receptive signed vocabulary tests, and the development of the ability to interpret iconic symbols are discussed.     

Young Children's Awareness of Their Mental Activity: The Case of Mental Rotation

From Piaget's early work to current theory of mind research, young children have been characterized as having little or no awareness of their mental activity. This conclusion was reexamined by assessing children's conscious access to visual imagery. Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were given a mental rotation task in the form of a computer game, but with no instructions to use mental rotation and no other references to mental activity. During the task, participants were asked to explain how they made their judgments. Reaction time patterns and verbal reports revealed that 6-year-olds were comparable to adults both in their spontaneous use and subjective awareness of mental rotation. Four-year-olds who referred to mental activity to explain their performance had reaction time and error patterns consistent with mental rotation; 4-year-olds who did not refer to mental activity responded randomly. A second study with 5-year-olds produced similar results. This research demonstrates that conscious access to at least 1 type of thinking is present earlier than previously recognized. It also helps to clarify the conditions under which young children will and will not notice and report their mental activity. These findings have implications for competing accounts of children's developing understanding of the mind and for the "imagery debate."     

Children''s Understanding of the Modal Expression of Speaker Certainty and Uncertainty and Its Relation to the Development of a Representational Theory of Mind

2 experiments examined children's understanding of the expression of speaker certainty and uncertainty and its relation to their developing theory of mind. In the first experiment, 80 children between 3 and 6 years of age were presented with a task in which they had to guess the location of an object hidden in 1 of 2 boxes. As clues to location, the children were presented with contrasting pairs of statements by 2 puppets. Different trials contained all of the possible pairwise combinations of either the modal verbs must, might, and could or the modal adjuncts probably, possibly, and maybe. Results showed that while 3-year-olds did not differentiate between any of the modal contrasts presented, 4-year-olds and older children were able to find the hidden object on the basis of what they heard. Performance was best for contrasts involving a highly certain term (either must or probably) paired with a less certain term (might, could, possibly, and maybe). Experiment 2 was designed to determine whether competence with modal terms was related to competence with mental terms in the same task, and whether performance on the certainty task was related to other aspects of the child's understanding of the nature of beliefs. 26 4-year-olds were presented with the certainty task, involving both modal and mental terms, and with tasks assessing their understanding of false beliefs, representational change, and the appearance-reality distinction. Results showed that all of these tasks were intercorrelated, implying that what may develop at 4 years of age may be a general understanding of the representational nature of belief.     

The development of children's ability to fill the gaps in their knowledge by consulting experts

This research investigated children's ability to recognize gaps in their knowledge and seek missing information from appropriate informants. In Experiment 1, forty-five 4- and 5-year-olds were adept in assigning questions from 3 domains (medicine, firefighting, and farming) to corresponding experts (doctor, firefighter, or farmer). However, when given the options of answering the same questions themselves or assigning them to an expert (Experiment 2), only 6-year-olds were consistently able to recognize when they did not know answers and then assign test questions correctly. Four- and 5-year-olds tended to overestimate their own knowledge or assign questions to the wrong expert. This result was replicated in Experiment 3, in which 5-year-olds were given incentives for correct answers.     

The development of forward search planning in preschoolers

Previous evidence suggesting that young children have some ability to plan by means of forward search suffers from typical findings that individual performance is inconsistent and group performance is low. In the present study, evidence is sought that children's imperfect performance results from unstable execution of the correct component processes of forward search, rather than from use of flawed or incomplete rules. 4- and 5-year-olds participated in a route-planning task in which they collected items from several locations in a large space. Incorrect routes required having to backtrack to locations previously visited. Forward search in this task required 3 component processes: representing a possible route, evaluating the route for backtracking, and if necessary, repeating the procedure for an alternate route. Evidence from stochastic parameter estimation and from children's self-corrections and explanations showed that 5-year-olds engaged in forward search, but that 4-year-olds used only a rudimentary form of forward search. Developmental changes involved children's ability to foresee and avoid backtracking, to consider alternate routes, and to spontaneously self-correct errors. Results are discussed in terms of implications for our understanding of the structure and development of early problem-solving skills in general.     

Children''s Understanding of Action Lines and the Static Representation of Speed of Locomotion

Children's understanding of the static representation of speed of locomotion was explored in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, 20 7-year-olds and 20 9-year-olds drew pictures of 2 people walking and running at different speeds. Children then made judgments about pairs of unambiguous drawings of a person walking or running, as did a sample of 20 adults. The drawings varied according to whether action lines, background lines, or no lines were present. Children were asked to say which figure appeared to be moving faster. In Experiment 2, 20 7-year-olds, 20 9-year-olds, and 21 adults sorted ambiguous drawings of a person walking and running at different speeds. The pictures again contained action lines, background lines, or no lines. In the drawing task, children more frequently used page position and biomechanical information than action lines to represent fast and slow walking and running. In the judgment task, 7- and 9-year-olds offered equivalent judgments of action lines and background lines, whereas adults distinguished between these pictorial devices. In the sorting task, all subjects distinguished between action lines and background lines and judged that pictures containing action lines looked faster than pictures containing background lines and pictures without lines. Taken together, the results indicate that subjects' judgments were influenced by the form of locomotion and degree of ambiguity in the depicted events they saw. The findings are consistent with the view that different categories of pictorial devices exist, but the effectiveness of each device is contingent upon the perceiver's experience with it and the context in which it appears.     

探析现代标志设计中文字视觉符号的结构特征及文化意义

从文字视觉符号的“图形化”与“符号化”特征出发,首先阐述了文字符号与现代标志设计之间的联系,其次通过对现代标志设计实例作品的归纳与分析,从“造型结构”、“表现特征”和“文化意义”三个方面总结归纳了文字视觉符号在现代标志设计中的表现方式,且分别强调了传统汉字和西方文字在标志设计中的特征,进而在竞争日益激烈的全球经济一体化的社会环境下,提出文字视觉符号在标志设计中的新思路。