Two-year-olds use artist intention to understand drawings.
Adults appreciate that an abstract visual representation can be understood through inferring the artist's intention. Many investigators have argued that this capacity is a late-emerging developmental accomplishment, a claim supported by findings that preschool children ignore explicit statements about intent when naming pictures. Using a simplified method, we explored picture naming in 2-year-olds. Experiment 1 found that when an adult artist drew an object, children later mapped a novel name for the drawing to the object that the adult had been looking at. Experiment 2 suggests that this response was not merely because there was more attention given to that object. These findings are consistent with the view that children are naturally disposed to reason about artifacts, including artwork, in terms of inferred intention.
Preissler
Melissa Allen
MA
University of Edinburgh, PPLS, 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, United Kingdom. Melissa.Preissler@ed.ac.uk
Bloom
Paul
P
D001154:Art; D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003210:Concept Formation; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D002666:Psychology, Child; D012660:Semantics