Taking decisions seriously: young children's understanding of conventional truth

Research suggests that young children may see a direct and one-way connection between facts about the world and epistemic mental states (e.g., belief). Conventions represent instances of active constructions of the mind that change facts about the world. As such, a mature understanding of convention would seem to present a strong challenge to children's simplified notions of epistemic relations. Three experiments assessed young children's abilities to track behavioral, representational, and truth aspects of conventions. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 30) recognized that conventional stipulations would change people's behaviors. However, participants generally failed to understand how stipulations might affect representations. In Experiment 2, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children (N = 53) were asked to reason about the truth values of statements about pretenses and conventions. The two younger groups of children often confused the two types of states, whereas older children consistently judged that conventions, but not pretenses, changed reality. In Experiment 3, the same 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 42) participated in tasks assessing their understanding of representational diversity (e.g., false belief). In general, children's performance on false-belief and "false-convention" tasks did not differ, which suggests that conventions were understood as involving truth claims (as akin to beliefs about physical reality). Children's difficulties with the idea of conventional truth seems consistent with current accounts of developing theories of mind.     

Developmental changes in the understanding of implied motion in two-dimensional pictures.

The power of various pictorial movement cues in eliciting a reading of movement was studied to determine the relationship between the ease with which a picture is interpreted and the degree to which the picture retains the structure of reality. Movement was indicated in 2 ways: pictorial conventions indicated movement by lines, blurs, and vibration marks; and pictorial postures indicated movement by figures which were isomorphic with the postures involved in real movement. Preschoolers, first graders, sixth graders, and college students were asked to label and sort pictures of human figures as "moving" or "still". Members of the 2 young groups did not classify pictures with conventional cues as "moving" as often as they did pictures with postural cues. Members of the 2 older groups classified both types of pictures as "moving". Since postural cues for movement are recognized at an earlier age than conventional cues, those that are more similar to reality may be easier to understand.     

Seeing and believing: children's understanding of the distinction between appearance and reality

When young children are asked questions about objects with misleading appearances, they make two kinds of errors: (1) phenomenism--they report appearance when asked to report reality; and (2) intellectual realism--they report reality when asked to report appearance. Two studies with 3-year-old children tested the hypothesis that phenomenism errors predominate when children are asked about objects' real and apparent properties, whereas intellectual realism errors predominate when children are asked about objects' real and apparent identities. The results of these studies provided some support for the property-identity hypothesis; children's appearance-reality judgments about properties tended to differ from those about identities. More phenomenism errors were elicited when the stimuli were described to the children in terms of their properties than when the very same stimulus objects were described in terms of their identities. Identity tasks were not found to elicit predominantly intellectual realism errors, although the data showed trends in this direction. The implications of these results for theories about young children's tendency to accept things in terms of their perceptual characteristics were briefly discussed.     

Literacy skills in children with cochlear implants: the importance of early oral language and joint storybook reading

The goal of this study was to longitudinally examine relationships between early factors (child and mother) that may influence children's phonological awareness and reading skills 3 years later in a group of young children with cochlear implants (N = 16). Mothers and children were videotaped during two storybook interactions, and children's oral language skills were assessed using the "Reynell Developmental Language Scales, third edition." Three years later, phonological awareness, reading skills, and language skills were assessed using the "Phonological Awareness Test," the "Woodcock-Johnson-III Diagnostic Reading Battery," and the "Oral Written Language Scales." Variables included in the data analyses were child (age, age at implant, and language skills) and mother factors (facilitative language techniques) and children's phonological awareness and reading standard scores. Results indicate that children's early expressive oral language skills and mothers' use of a higher level facilitative language technique (open-ended question) during storybook reading, although related, each contributed uniquely to children's literacy skills. Individual analyses revealed that the children with expressive standard scores below 70 at Time 1 also performed below average (<85) on phonological awareness and total reading tasks 3 years later. Guidelines for professionals are provided to support literacy skills in young children with cochlear implants.     

An Investigation of the New York State Regents Examinations in Science

This study examined the effects of realism on subjects’ recognition memory for computergraphics. Children and adults in six age groups (N = 189) were presented with pictorial computergraphic materials at three levels of realism: low (abstract or schematic—images reduced to simple flat shapes), medium (linear—simple line drawings), and high (realistic—photographic images and detailed drawings). Pictorial content was sampled widely from existing computer materials with each image containing only one pictorial element: person, animal, or object. Recognition memory was tested at immediate and a week’s delay. Recognition of the three kinds of image showed an unusual pattern of decline over time with the initial advantage for realistic and abstract computergraphics disappearing at a week’s delay, while recognition for linear images was superior to that of realistic and abstract. Although recognition memory increased with age, no interaction between age and realism was found. That is, all age groups, 6 years through middle age, retained the linear computergraphics best. Discussion includes interpretations of these findings and their instructional implications.     

论儿童精神的自我中心主义

自我中心主义是儿童精神的基本特质。儿童的目的论、人为主义、泛灵论、实在论、原逻辑主义等精神倾向,都堪称是对于自我中心主义的直接演示或曲折反映。这种精神特质的发生与发展根源于儿童个体所携带着的种族进化的生物性积淀,并伴随后天社会性文化的影响而表现出不断去自我中心化的过程。自我中心主义是保障儿童发展潜能免受理性文化过分透支的一道精神屏障。     

Young Children's Understanding of Thought Bubbles and of Thoughts

In a series of 4 studies, we explored preschoolers' understanding of thought bubbles. Very few 3-year-olds or 4-year-olds we tested knew what a thought-bubble depiction was without instruction. But, if simply told that the thought bubble "shows what someone is thinking," the vast majority of 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds easily understood the devices as depicting thoughts generally and individual thought contents specifically. In total, these children used thought-bubble depictions to ascertain the contents of characters' thoughts in a variety of situations; appropriately distinguished such depictions from mere associated actions or objects; described thought bubbles in the language of mental states; judged that persons' thoughts in these depictions were subjective in the sense of person-specific (and hence 2 people can have different thoughts about the same state of affairs); and judged that thought-bubble thoughts ( a ) were representational in the sense of depicting or showing some other state of affairs, ( b ) were mental and thus showed intangible, private, internal thoughts unlike real pictures or photographs, and ( c ) can be false, that is, can depict a person's misrepresentation of some state of affairs. We discuss the implications of these findings for young children's understanding of thoughts and thought bubbles, for their learning and comprehension of pictorial conventions, and for the use of thought bubbles to assess children's early understanding of mind.     

依托班级公约促进幼儿规则意识养成的实践研究

将班级公约引入幼儿教育中,能增强幼儿的独立意识,提升幼儿的自主管理能力。文章分析依托班级公约培养幼儿规则意识的意义,指出教师要在游戏活动中培养幼儿的规则意识,在角色扮演活动中激发幼儿的模仿心理,在情境教育中鼓励幼儿自主制定规则,重视巩固强化幼儿的规则意识。     

关于幼儿家长幼儿心理健康观的访谈研究

心理健康观作为一种内在、稳定性的主体认识,决定家长对幼儿心理健康问题的识别和处理.对60名幼儿家长进行半结构式深度访谈调查表明:家长认为幼儿心理健康主要体现在性格、人际交往与社会适应、个人行为及能力、道德品质、情绪五个方面;家长的心理健康观具有模糊性、主观性、功利性等特点,并呈现出重外轻内、重适应轻发展的倾向;传统文化价值观、自身经历和认知水平影响幼儿家长心理健康观的构建.     

Determining young aboriginal children's scientific understandings: A pilot study

Conclusion The pilot study provided a range of useful data for analysis. In all areas except the children's recall of traditional stories, richly contextualized data was collected. It was felt that the children's young age and not the questions themselves about traditional stories was the limiting factor. The age factor variable is yet to be examined closely. Children older than eight will be interviewed using the story book on night and day to determine if it will successfully reveal any traditional stories they know, and this data will be analysed to see if the stories influence their scientific understandings of night and day. Overall the study aimed to develop a research design and instruments that would readily tap into young Aboriginal children's scientific understandings in a relevant and cross-culturally sensitive way. The richness of the data collected would indicate that this aim has been met. The next step will be to determine the significance of the data collected and whether data should be collected from a larger sample of young Aboriginal children in each of the community contexts described by the NAEC (1985): Traditional, Rural, Urban Dispersed and Urban. Specializations: early childhood science education.     

Fate and Fortune in a Modern Fairy Tale: Louis Sachar's Holes

Louis Sachar's Holes, first published in 1998, is an impressive example of how the themes and motifs of one of the oldest genres, the fairy tale, live on in contemporary children's fiction, and thus provide authors with an alternative to gritty realism' as a means of presenting to young readers the harshest of topics and environments. This article shows how Sachar adapts some of the characteristics of fairy tale, such as magic objects and formulae, stereotypical roles and repeated motifs, within a story set in a desert penal establishment for young offenders. Because of this blend between fantasy and realism, the provision of the novel with a fairy tale ending by means of a number of otherwise unbelievable coincidences, does not overtax the reader's credulity, but rather endows the novel with a positive message about the qualities of the human spirit.     

ADULT AGE DIFFERENCES IN SPEED AND ACCURACY OF MATCHING VERBAL AND PICTORIAL SIGNS

Young (mean age of 19 years) and older (mean age of 69 years) adults participated in a two‐choice, matching‐to‐sample reaction time experiment. Young adults responded more quickly than older adults; all subjects responded more quickly to a verbal standard sign than to a pictorial standard. However, there was an age difference in speed of performance only for those subjects in the stimulus order condition receiving first pictorial standards and then verbal standards. These data are interpreted within a model of dual memory processing systems (verbal and nonverbal). During adulthood there is an increasing tendency for verbal codes to elicit more general associations of both a verbal and a pictorial symbolic nature, while a pictorial code continues to activate only other pictorial stimuli. More generally, the implications of such a model for understanding aging and educational gerontology are discussed.     

Children's Judgments of Flags and Flag-Burning

This study examined children's conceptions of flags as social conventions and understandings of the symbolic and psychological consequences associated with transgressions toward flags. Seventy-two children, at 6, 8, and 10 years, answered general questions about flags as social conventions and judged flag-burning scenarios in which intentions of agents and consequences for recipients were varied. Flag-burning acts were motivated by symbolic, accidental, or instrumental intentions and occurred in public or private. Children at all ages viewed flags as social conventions (i.e., alterable), and symbolic acts of flag-burning occurring in public locations were judged more negatively than private transgressions. Age differences were found in evaluations of instrumental violations and in justifications used to evaluate flag-burning incidents. Overall, findings suggest that despite age-related increases in understanding of flags as meaningful collective symbols, children at all ages considered transgressions to be important and to have moral consequences (i.e., psychological harm).     

Social Class Effects on Northeastern Brazilian Children's Conceptions of Areas of Personal Choice and Social Regulation

2 studies examined middle- and lower-class Brazilian children's concepts of personal choice and social regulation. In Study 1, interviews of 40 middle- and lower-class children (9 and 15 years old) revealed that children across classes distinguished moral from conventional issues on the bases of rule contingency and act generalizability criteria. Lower-class children, however, were less likely to view conventions as rule contingent and more likely to generalize conventional acts. In Study 2, interviews of 240 middle- and lower-class children (ages 8, 12, 16 years) found that across classes, children distinguished prudential issues from matters they treated as personal. Prudential issues were seen as subject to parental authority. Middle-class children were more likely to treat personal issues as matters of choice. With age, lower-class children increasingly tended to treat personal items as matters of choice, and by adolescence there were no class differences. Findings show that Brazilian children maintain a heterogeneous orientation to rules and authority which includes a domain of personal choice. Class differences indicate that hierarchical social structures affect children's sense of autonomy. However, developmental effects indicate that a domain of personal choice emerges among children across social classes.     

道家的"自然"及现代启示

道家的“自然”包含有丰腴的理性内蕴：关注动物生存权利的物道主义;尊重人的自由的人道主义;充满反抗精神的批判现实主义;崇尚“法天贵真”的审美理念;脱离世俗的超现实主义;知足常乐、安之若命的宿命论等。认真解读这份珍贵的文化遗存,将为我们提供多方面的现代启示。     

A Comparison of Young Children's Understanding of Contradictory Representations in Pretense, Memory, and Belief

The present study examined the nature of young children's understanding of various mental representations. 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with story protagonists who held mental representations (beliefs, pretenses, and memories) that contradicted reality. Subjects chose 1 of 2 alternate " thought pictures " (depicting either the mental representation or reality) that reflected the mental state. While 4-year-olds performed relatively well on all scenario types, 3-year-olds chose the correct thought picture significantly more often for pretense and memory scenarios than for false belief scenarios. These results suggest that young children conceptualize pretense as involving mental representations, and that they have more difficulty understanding contradictory mental representations that purport to correspond to reality.     

论散文理论的革命现实主义形态--兼论其对现代性理论的冲击

本文将革命文学背景中形成的左翼散文理论称作“革命现实主义”的 ,首先是基于它对现实的关切 ,它所提出的真实反映现实社会的倾向 ,体现出“现实主义”的某种特征 ,但它反对散文高蹈的超越现实的精神、独立自由的个性论之上的文学主体性 ,并确立了散文作为政治意识形态宣传的工具论 ,使散文激进介入政治运作 ,既放弃了散文作为文学所倚赖的文学性 ,也悖离了现实主义的批判性。     

Modeling referential actions in 6- to 18-month-old infants: a precursor to symbolic understanding

Social precursors to symbolic understanding of pictures were examined with 100 infants ages 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18 months. Adults demonstrated 1 of 2 stances toward pictures and objects (contemplative or manipulative), and then gave items to infants for exploration. For pictures, older infants (12, 15, and 18 months) emulated the adult's actions following both types of demonstration trials. For objects, infants did not emulate actions following either stance at any age. The findings suggest that infants enlist their imitative learning skills in the context of learning the conventions of action on pictorial symbols. The data are interpreted as pointing to the importance of social learning in developing an understanding of the referential function of pictorial symbols.     

Young children's overgeneralizations with fixed transitivity verbs

The present study examined English-speaking children's tendency to make argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., I disappeared it). Children were exposed to several English verbs of fixed transitivity (exclusively intransitive or exclusively transitive) and then asked questions that encouraged them to overgeneralize usage of the verbs. Seventy-two children (24 in each of three age groups: 3, 4/5, and 8 years of age) experienced four actions performed by puppets. Each action had two verbs of similar meaning associated with it in the context of the experimental action: one more familiar to young children and one less familiar. Children at all ages were more likely to overgeneralize usage of verbs that were less familiar to them, supporting the hypothesis that children's usage of verbs in particular construction types becomes entrenched over time. As children solidly learn the transitivity status of particular verbs, they become more reluctant to use those verbs in other argument structure constructions.     

论儿童精神的潜意识化

儿童精神的潜意识化倾向大大降低了儿童精神的理性自觉,使儿童对于世界存在的感知表现出一种非理性、非自觉的体验。这种精神倾向是种族进化中沉淀下来的一种“原始遗产”,是个体生命成长和保持巨大发展潜能的精神根基或源泉。顺应儿童精神的潜意识倾向,充分发挥隐性教育的陶冶功能,是儿童教育的基本策略。