Young children's use of scale models: testing an alternative to representational insight.
Using a symbolic object such as a model as a source of information about something else requires some appreciation of the relation between the symbol and what it represents. Representational insight has been proposed as essential to success in a symbolic retrieval task in which children must use information from a hiding event in a scale model to find a toy hidden in a room. The two studies reported here examine and reject a proposed alternative account for success in the model task. The results with 2.5-year-olds and 3-year-olds show that children's successful use of a scale model cannot be attributed to the simple detection of the correspondences between the objects in the two spaces. A higher-level representation of the model-room relation (i.e. representational insight) is required. The results are discussed with respect to the coalescence of multiple factors in determining performance in the model task.
Troseth
Georgene L
GL
Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37203-5701, USA. georgene.troseth@vanderbilt.edu
Bloom Pickard
Megan E
ME
DeLoache
Judy S
JS
D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011340:Problem Solving; D013561:Symbolism; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis