Mindful of Symbols

[beam me up scottie]

SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.COM
August 2005 issue
Psychology

Mindful of Symbols

On the way to learning that one thing can represent another, young children often conflate the real item and its symbol. These errors show how difficult it is to start thinking symbolically

By Judy S. DeLoache

About 20 years ago I had one of those wonderful moments when research takes an unexpected but fruitful turn. I had been studying toddler memory and was beginning a new experiment with two-and-a-half- and three-year-olds. For the project, I had built a model of a room that was part of my lab. The real space was furnished like a standard living room, albeit a rather shabby one, with an upholstered couch, an armchair, a cabinet and so on. The miniature items were as similar as possible to their larger counterparts: they were the same shape and material, covered with the same fabric and arranged in the same positions. For the study, a child watched as we hid a miniature toy--a plastic dog we dubbed "Little Snoopy"--in the model, which we referred to as "Little Snoopy's room." We then encouraged the child to find "Big Snoopy," a large version of the toy "hiding in the same place in his big room." We wondered whether children could use their memory of the small room to figure out where to find the toy in the large one.

The three-year-olds were, as we had expected, very successful. After they observed the small toy being placed behind the miniature couch, they ran into the room and found the large toy behind the real couch. But the two-and-a-half-year-olds, much to my and their parents' surprise, failed abysmally. They cheerfully ran into the room to retrieve the large toy, but most of them had no idea where to look, even though they remembered where the tiny toy was hidden in the miniature room and could readily find it there.
Their failure to use what they knew about the model to draw an inference about the room indicated that they did not appreciate the relation between the model and room. I soon realized that my memory study was instead a study of symbolic understanding and that the younger children's failure might be telling us something interesting about how and when youngsters acquire the ability to understand that one object can stand for another.

What most distinguishes humans from other creatures is our ability to create and manipulate a wide variety of symbolic representations. This capacity enables us to transmit information from one generation to another, making culture possible, and to learn vast amounts without having direct experience--we all know about dinosaurs despite never having met one. Because of the fundamental role of symbolization in almost everything we do, perhaps no aspect of human development is more important than becoming symbol-minded. What could be more fascinating, I concluded, than finding out how young children begin to use and understand symbolic objects and how they come to master some of the symbolic items ubiquitous in modern life. As a result of that fortuitous model-room experiment, I shifted my focus from memory to symbolic thinking.

http://sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=000ACE3F-007E-12DC-807E83414B7F0000

[JDPriestly]

1. Interesting.

Thanks.

[Igel]

2. I found it was one thing to be told things like this, but it's completely

different to see it.

Mind boggling at times, confusing at other times, befuddling sometimes, and really, really exciting (for all concerned) when there's a cognitive leap.

[beam me up scottie]

3. I really enjoyed reading about

her experiments.
She seemed to be as fascinated by them as I was.
And she had no problem admitting she was just as surprised at some of the results.