Development of Knowledge about the Appearance-Reality Distinction

Abstract

7 studies of the acquisition of knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction suggest the following course of development. Many 3-year-olds seem to possess little or no understanding of the distinction. They fail the simplest Appearance-Reality (AR) tasks and are unresponsive to efforts to teach them the distinction. Skill in solving simple AR tasks is highly correlated with skill in solving simple perceptual Perspective-taking (PT) tasks; this suggests the hypothesis that the ability to represent the selfsame stimulus in two different, seemingly incompatible ways may underlie both skills. Children of 6-7 years have acquired both skills but nevertheless find it very difficult to reflect on and talk about such appearance-reality concepts as "looks like," "really and truly," and "looks different from the way it really and truly is." In contrast, children of 11-12 years, and to an even greater degree college students, possess a substantial body of rich, readily accessible, and explicit knowledge in this area.

On having complex representations of things: Preschoolers use multiple words for objects and people.

“…A total of only 3.0 incongruous responses was produced. Thus, whereas the mean number of correct response patterns is comparable to numbers reported by Flavell (e.g., Flavell et al, 1983Flavell et al, , 1987Flavell et al, , 1986, our participants showed more one-sided intellectual realism. This may be because our objects were somewhat less deceptive, with more obvious functions, than those used by Flavell and colleagues.…”

“…The importance of lexical development for polynomy is demonstrated not only by ~0 Ray (1996) found a relationship between children's performance on object property (e.g., color) and object identity appearance-reality tasks, r = .48, p < .0l. (Flavell et al, 1986, also found such a relation but did not control for age, rendering it uninterpretable. Ray partialed out age.)…”

“…The appearance-reality task is often treated as an index of children's representational facility (Flavell et al, 1986). Children see representational objects with dissociated appearance and function (e.g., a sponge that looks like a rock) and answer questions that imply an object's appearance (e.g., rock) and its function (e.g., sponge).…”

“…The procedure was modeled after Flavell et al (1986). Children were shown two training objects and then four test objects.…”

“…They do not readily look at the same object or situation in different ways simultaneously. Sometimes young children process only one aspect of an event or situation (e.g., Piaget, 1941Piaget, /1965, sometimes they see only one aspect of an object (e.g., Elkind, 1978;Flavell, Flavell, Green, 1983;Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1986;Inhelder & Piaget, 1964;Taylor & Hort, 1990;Winer, 1980;Zelazo & Frye, 1996), and sometimes they are predisposed to apply only one category label to an item (e.g., Liittschwager & Markman, 1994;Markman & Wachtel, 1988;Merriman & Bowman, 1989;). Children's performance in several paradigms (conservation, appearance reality, class inclusion, word learning, t Polynomy applies to count nouns as well as to other form classes (e.g., proper names, mass nouns, and noun phrases in general).…”