The Medium Can Obscure the Message: Young Children's Understanding of Video

Abstract

In the first few years of life, children acquire a great deal of general information through symbolic media, including television. Here we explored whether very young children would use information presented via video to solve a retrieval problem. The children watched on a monitor as a toy was hidden in the room next door. A group of 2%-year-olds was very successful at finding the hidden toy based on the televised hiding event, but a group of 2-year-olds was not. Substantially better performance was achieved by other 2-year-olds who either watched the hiding event directly through a window or who believed they were watching directly (but were in fact looking at the monitor through the window). These results (like those from other symbolic media such as models and pictures) indicate that very young children have difficulty using a symbolic representation as a source of information about an existing situation.

Television watching at Greek paediatric hospitals

“…This study also agrees with findings that children whose parents determine the time and the kind of television programme watch less television [7,8].…”

“…Researchers have found several characteristics which influence television watching habits of children [1,2,[4][5][6][7][8]. In Greece there are no studies concerning television watching during hospitalization and this fact was the motivation to conduct the present survey.…”

Young Children’s Tablet Use and Associations with Maternal Well-Being

“…For instance, research comparing live versus comparable screen-based situations has found lower levels of learning from television for children under approximately 30 months for a variety of tasks (e.g., Barr and Hayne 1999;Hayne et al 2003;Kuhl et al 2003;Troseth and DeLoache 1998), a pattern referred to as the video deficit (Anderson and Pempek 2005), or, more recently, the transfer deficit (Barr 2013).…”

The role of perceptual similarity of the task environments in children’s perseverative responding

“…Perseverative responding, defined as a tendency to repeat a previous response, has been demonstrated in children's performance in a variety of contexts, including symbolic comprehension (DeLoache, 1995a;DeLoache, Pierroutsakos, Uttal, Rosengren, & Gottlieb, 1998), A-not-B tasks (Bjork & Cummings, 1984;Cummings & Bjork, 1981;Diamond, 1985;Piaget, 1936Piaget, /1954, spatial recognition (Bremner, 1978;Bremner & Bryant, 1977), and cognitive inflexibility (Zelazo & Frye, 1997;Zelazo, 2002;Suddendorf, 2003;Troseth & DeLoache, 1998). 1 Given the frequent nature of such responses, it is of interest to further investigate the source of this perseverative responding in symbolic tasks.…”