Rapid Change in the Symbolic Functioning of Very Young Children

DeLoache, Judy S.

doi:10.1126/science.2446392

Cited by 501 publications

(423 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…A fourth grader, at age 9 or 10, would be expected to have a firm grasp of representational correspondence, given that even by age 3, children typically understand the general "stand-for" significance of representations (e.g., DeLoache, 1987). From this developmental perspective, then, the surprise is not that the explaining children avoided representational correspondence errors but that the baseline children made such errors.…”

Section: Reimann (1992) Analogic Enhancement a Studying Worked Examplmentioning

confidence: 94%

Eliciting Self-Explanations Improves Children's Performance on a Field-Based Map Skills Task

Kastens

Liben

2007

Cognition and Instruction

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To investigate children's ability to translate between the environment and an abstract representation, fourth graders were asked to indicate the location of colored flags by placing similarly colored stickers on a map. In the explaining condition, students wrote down what clues they had used; in the baseline condition, they placed stickers without explanation. The explaining students significantly outperformed the baseline students, especially with respect to egregious errors indicative of failure to understand basic representational correspondence. The hypothesized interpretation is that children who generated explanations were more likely to notice and then correct discrepancies between their answers in progress and the referent space and that they did so by activating existing spatial and symbolic competencies.Becoming a skilled user of maps in the real world is not an easy cognitive task. When people look around them, they see a world that is constantly changing: day to night, season to season, and minute to minute. They perceive a landscape of millions of tiny details: blades of grass, cracks in the sidewalk, ripples on the pond. They look horizontally out across the landscape, from a vantage point 4 or 5 ft (ap-

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Section: Reimann (1992) Analogic Enhancement a Studying Worked Examplmentioning

confidence: 94%

Eliciting Self-Explanations Improves Children's Performance on a Field-Based Map Skills Task

Kastens

Liben

2007

Cognition and Instruction

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“…Symbolization is thought a hallmark of human cognition: the use of symbols for acquiring knowledge distinguishes humans from other species (DeLoache, 2004) and symbolization plays a prominent role in cognitive development (DeLoache, 1987;Preissler and Carey, 2004). Although language is the most powerful and prevalent symbol system, we are exposed in daily life to all kinds of symbols, such as pictures, maps, and traffic lights.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Top-Down Processing of Symbolic Meanings Modulates the Visual Word Form Area

2012

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Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies on humans have identified a region in the left middle fusiform gyrus consistently activated by written words. This region is called the visual word form area (VWFA). Recently, a hypothesis, called the interactive account, is proposed that to effectively analyze the bottom-up visual properties of words, the VWFA receives predictive feedback from higherorder regions engaged in processing sounds, meanings, or actions associated with words. Further, this top-down influence on the VWFA is independent of stimulus formats. To test this hypothesis, we used fMRI to examine whether a symbolic nonword object (e.g., the Eiffel Tower) intended to represent something other than itself (i.e., Paris) could activate the VWFA. We found that scenes associated with symbolic meanings elicited a higher VWFA response than those not associated with symbolic meanings, and such top-down modulation on the VWFA can be established through short-term associative learning, even across modalities. In addition, the magnitude of the symbolic effect observed in the VWFA was positively correlated with the subjective experience on the strength of symbol-referent association across individuals. Therefore, the VWFA is likely a neural substrate for the interaction of the top-down processing of symbolic meanings with the analysis of bottom-up visual properties of sensory inputs, making the VWFA the location where the symbolic meaning of both words and nonword objects is represented.

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“…The ability to map distances from one space to another is involved in many daily activities, such as interpreting navigation aids or imagining the height of a building by looking at its blueprint. Around the age of 3 years, children are able to establish symbolic correspondence between a model and its referent (DeLoache, 1987), but successful mapping between spatial representations also requires an understanding of geometric correspondence (Downs, 1985;Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Around the age of 3 years, children are able to establish symbolic correspondence between a model and its referent (DeLoache, 1987), but successful mapping between spatial representations also requires an understanding of geometric correspondence (Downs, 1985;Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 2000).…”

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confidence: 99%

Zooming in on spatial scaling: Preschool children and adults use mental transformations to scale spaces.

Möhring¹,

Newcombe²,

Frick³

2014

Developmental Psychology

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Spatial scaling is an important prerequisite for many spatial tasks and involves an understanding of how distances in different-sized spaces correspond. Previous studies have found evidence for such an understanding in preschoolers; however, the mental processes involved remain unclear. The present study investigated whether children and adults use mental transformations to scale distances in space. Adults and 4-and 5-year-old children (N = 60) were asked to use maps to locate target objects in a larger referent space on a touchscreen. The size of the referent space was held constant, but the sizes of the maps were varied systematically, resulting in seven scaling factors. A linear increase in response times and errors with increasing scaling factor suggested that participants of every age group mentally transformed the size of the map to compare it to the referent, providing evidence for an analog imagery strategy in children's and adults' spatial scaling. Spatial scaling is fundamental to many spatial tasks that require an understanding of how distances in different-sized spaces are related. The ability to map distances from one space to another is involved in many daily activities, such as interpreting navigation aids or imagining the height of a building by looking at its blueprint. Around the age of 3 years, children are able to establish symbolic correspondence between a model and its referent (DeLoache, 1987), but successful mapping between spatial representations also requires an understanding of geometric correspondence (Downs, 1985;Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 2000).A crucial precondition for establishing geometric correspondence is the ability to encode distances in a metric manner. There is evidence that metric coding is present early in life. Looking time studies revealed that 5-month-old infants are sensitive to changes in metric distances (Newcombe, Huttenlocher, & Learmonth, 1999;Newcombe, Sluzenski & Huttenlocher, 2005), and toddlers encode distance metrically in a hide-and-seek game (Huttenlocher, Newcombe, & Sandberg, 1994). Furthermore, magnitude coding is used early in life, as evidenced by infants' discrimination of space, time, number, and speed (Brannon, Lutz, & Cordes, 2006;Brannon, Suanda, & Libertus, 2007;Möhring, Libertus, & Bertin, 2012;Xu & Spelke, 2000), and recent studies yielded evidence for cross-dimensional transfer, suggesting that magnitude information regarding various dimensions is coded in one representational system (de Hevia & Spelke, 2010;Lourenco & Longo, 2010). It is likely that metric understanding is based on this fundamental comparative system, termed the general magnitude system (Walsh, 2003).A second crucial step in establishing geometric correspondence is to map distances from one space to another, which -for different sized spaces -requires spatial scaling. Running Head: ZOOMING IN ON SPATIAL SCALING 4Previous research has shown that if task demands are low and locations vary on one dimension only, 3-year-olds are able to locate objects in a referent space,...

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Rapid Change in the Symbolic Functioning of Very Young Children

Cited by 501 publications

References 8 publications

Eliciting Self-Explanations Improves Children's Performance on a Field-Based Map Skills Task

Eliciting Self-Explanations Improves Children's Performance on a Field-Based Map Skills Task

Top-Down Processing of Symbolic Meanings Modulates the Visual Word Form Area

Zooming in on spatial scaling: Preschool children and adults use mental transformations to scale spaces.

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