The Credible Shrinking Room: Very Young Children's Performance With Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Relations

@article{Deloache1997TheCS,
  title={The Credible Shrinking Room: Very Young Children's Performance With Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Relations},
  author={Judy S Deloache and Kevin F. Miller and Karl S. Rosengren},
  journal={Psychological Science},
  year={1997},
  volume={8},
  pages={308 - 313}
}
Becoming a proficient symbol user is a universal developmental task in the first years of life, but detecting and mentally representing symbolic relations can be quite challenging for young children To test the extent to which symbolic reasoning per se is problematic, we compared the performance of 2 1/2-year-olds in symbolic and nonsymbolic versions of a search task. The children had to use their knowledge of the location of a toy hidden in a room to draw an inference about where to find a… 
View on SAGE
uk.sagepub.com
150 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
5
Background Citations
31
Methods Citations
3
Results Citations
5

Figures from this paper

150 Citations

The role of perseveration in children's symbolic understanding and skill

In the first few years of life, children become increasingly sensitive to the significance of a variety of symbolic artifacts. An extensive body of research has explored very young children’s ability…

Symbolic Insight and Inhibitory Control: Two Problems Facing Young Children on Symbolic Retrieval Tasks

Many recent studies have explored young children's ability to use information from physical representations of space to guide search within the real world. In one commonly used procedure, children…

Forgetting and symbolic insight: Delay improves children's use of a novel symbol.

The Role of Representational Flexibility in Toddlers' Manual Search

TLDR
Performance on the model room task was not predicted by measures of inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility or vocabulary, but was predicted by performance on the Delayed Recognition Span Test (DRST), a measure of recognition memory, which lends support to the theory of competing representations.

Dual representation and young children's use of scale models.

TLDR
The results provide strong support for dual representation, which was as difficult for 2 1/2-year-olds to achieve with a set of individual objects as it was with an integrated model.

Linguistic Mediation of Children's Performance in a New Symbolic Understanding Task

The effects of language on symbolic functioning were examined using the boxes task, a new symbolic understanding task based on DeLoache's model task. Children (N = 32; ages 2;4–3;8) observed an…

The Development of Symbolic Coordination: Representation of Imagined Objects, Executive Function, and Theory of Mind

Children's developing competence with symbolic representations was assessed in 3 studies. Study 1 examined the hypothesis that the production of imaginary symbolic objects in pantomime requires the…

Early development of strategies for mapping symbol-referent relations : what do young children understand about scale models?

The research reported here investigated the nature of young children’s understanding of a novel symbol—a scale model. Children witnessed the hiding of a small toy in a scale model of a room and were…

Taking a hard look at concreteness: Do concrete objects help young children to learn symbolic relations?

TLDR
The first similarity between children's difficulties with the model and with manipulatives is that dual representation is relevant to both, and children often fail to see the relation between solving mathematics problems via manipULatives and solving the same or similar problems via abstract symbols.

The Development of Early Symbolization: Educational Implications.

...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 43 REFERENCES

Transfer in young children's understanding of spatial representations.

TLDR
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.

Symbolic functioning in very young children: understanding of pictures and models.

TLDR
4 studies investigating very young children's understanding of 2 different kinds of symbolic stimuli--scale models and pictures report findings that 2.5-year-old children have great difficulty appreciating the relation between a scale model and the larger space it represents, but that they very readily appreciate the relationship between a picture and its referent.

Young children's understanding of the correspondence between a scale model and a larger space

Waiting to use a symbol: the effects of delay on children's use of models.

TLDR
The results indicate that keeping a symbol-referent relation in mind can be difficult for 3.0-year-old children.

Rapid change in the symbolic functioning of very young children.

TLDR
The success of the group of older children reveals an advance in their cognitive flexibility: they think of a model in two ways at the same time--both as the thing itself and as a symbol for something else.

Understanding the Representational Mind

A model of writing in cognitive development, Understanding the Representational Mind synthesizes the burgeoning literature on the child's theory of mind to provide an integrated account of children's…

Physical similarity and young children's understanding of scale models.

TLDR
In general, the children's retrieval scores increased as a function of increasing similarity, although younger children required a higher degree of similarity to appreciate the model-room correspondence than did older children.

Pretend play skills and the child's theory of mind.

TLDR
This paper investigates whether pretend play is an area of advanced understanding with reference to 3 skills that are implicated in both pretend play and a theory of mind: the ability to represent one object as two things at once, the able to see one objects as representing another, and the abilityto represent mental representations.

Young children's use of models and photographs as spatial representations

The use of dolls to interview young children: issues of symbolic representation.

TLDR
In the study reported here, 2-1/2-, 3- and 4-year-old children played some games with an experimenter, and they were interviewed immediately afterward, and the children did have difficulty using the doll as a self-representation and mapping from themselves to the doll.