EARLY UNDERSTANDING OF THE REPRESENTATIONAL FUNCTION OF PICTURES

An important function of pictures is the communication of information - a function that has been ignored in research on the development of p ictorial perception and comprehension. When are young children first c apable of using pictures as a source of information to guide their beh avior? The six studies reported here reveal a dramatic developmental c hange between 24 and 30 months of age in the use of pictorial informat ion about the location of a hidden object. When presented with a pictu re that showed the location of a hidden toy, 30-month-olds readily ret rieved the toy, but 24-month-olds did not. The extremely poor performa nce of the 24-month-olds was replicated and shown to persist in spite of various modifications made in the task in an effort to improve perf ormance. We conclude that our 24-month-old subjects did not interpret the pictures as representations of current reality. We propose that ve ry young children's early pictorial experience may predispose them to be overly conservative in interpreting the relation between pictures a nd their referents.