Realist errors in children's responses to pictures and words as representations

In three experiments we examined the judgments made by 3- to 4- year-old ch ildren about out-of-date physical representations which no longer matched t heir referents. The referent was a doll wearing a sticker, and the sticker was swapped for a different one after a picture had been drawn of the initi al state of affairs (Experiments 1 and 2) or after the name of the doll and its original sticker had been written down (Experiment 3). We confirmed pr evious findings of realist errors in identity judgments for pictures and sh owed also that children tended to misidentify the name of a sticker in a wr itten list to match a change to its referent. Thus, realist errors are not confined to representations which are iconically similar to their referents . Furthermore, children also judged incorrectly that the pictures and words had actually been changed, indicating that realist errors to external repr esentations extend to operations performed on their referents as well as to their identities. (C) 1999 Academic Press.