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People use pictures for many purposes, but two common functions are to communicate information to others and to extract new information. Previous research has demonstrated that 2-year-old children fail in using pictures as sources of information in search tasks (DeLoache & Burns, 1994). The purpose of this research was to investigate if children this age could, nonetheless, communicate via a picture the location of an object they have observed being hidden and, if so, whether experience with this function can facilitate using pictures as sources of information. Results show that children successfully used pictures to communicate information and that the symbolic awareness children gained with this task was rapidly transferred to one that required using pictures to extract information, task in which they otherwise fail.

No abstract

Three studies investigated the effects of pedagogical cues to artist's referential intention on 2-and 2.5-year-old children's understanding of drawings in a matching task without verbal labels support. Results showed that pedagogical cues, the combination of the artist's eye gaze while she was creating the drawings (non-linguistic cues) and verbal descriptions about her graphic actions (linguistic cues), enabled 2-year-olds to match highly realistic line-drawings with referents. However, 2-year-olds' performance was not influenced to an equal degree by non-linguistic and linguistic cues; verbal scripts appeared to be the critical aspect of pedagogical demonstration even with pre-drawn pictures. By contrast, at 2.5 years of age, children inferred the artist's intention when comprehending drawings in the absence of pedagogical cues. This research illustrates the potential power of pedagogical demonstration to communicate referential intentions in the pictorial symbol domain.