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Young children's use of scale models: testing an alternative to representational insight
Author(s) -
Troseth Georgene L.,
Bloom Pickard Megan E.,
DeLoache Judy S.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00625.x
Subject(s) - psychology , task (project management) , representation (politics) , cognitive psychology , object (grammar) , relation (database) , symbol (formal) , scale (ratio) , computer science , artificial intelligence , data mining , physics , management , quantum mechanics , politics , political science , law , economics , programming language
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.