Distringuishing between appearance and reality in a dressing-up game - a problem of dualcoding or preserving identity?

Three-year-old children's difficulty in understanding discrepancies between appearance and reality is attributed to a metarepresentational deficit in the Theory of Mind literature. Young children fail to take two conflicting representations of an object into consideration. An alternative explanation , young children's failure to conserve identity, has been neglected in rece nt research. In a now historical study DeVries (1969), showed that 3- to 4- year-old children were deeply confused about the identity of a cat when an experimenter put a mask of a fierce dog on its face, DeVries concluded that an undeveloped concept of identity leads children to believe in a transfor mation of the cat into a dog. Recent research on preschoolers' understandin g of biological concepts gives reason to doubt her conclusion. In the prese nt investigation of children's ability to differentiate pretend identity fr om real identity, we show that the representational demands of dual coding are the main source of children's difficulties in preserving identity. The task was to differentiate the pretend from the real identity of a disguised experimenter. Pie 3- to 4-year-old children distinguished pretense from re ality correctly in only 44% of the cases. However, in 77% of all cases the children were able to tell about the real identity of the disguised person. This finding is evidence against the view that young children generally be lieve in transformations. Rather, it appears that many young children in De Vries' study did not believe in the disguised cat's transformation, but wer e unable to simultaneously represent appearance and reality in the question ing procedure.