Young Children's Knowledge about Visual Perception: Hiding Objects from Others

Abstract

Children of ages 2 1/2, 3, and 3 1/2 years were tested for their understanding of object hiding, believed to reflect an early developmental level of knowledge about visual perception. Even the youngest subjects could nonegocentrically hide an object by placing it on the opposite side of a screen from another person, even though placing it there necessarily left it unhidden from themselves. In contrast, there was a significant increase with age in the ability to achieve the same physical end state by placing the screen between the other person and the object. Most subjects at each age level correctly indicated that the other person could see the object when the experimenter interposed the screen between the child and the object but that the other person could not see the object when she placed the screen between the other person and the object. These and other recent findings indicate that children of this age can be both nonegocentric and skillful at estimating what other people do and do not see under various viewing conditions.

Can Young Preschool Children Be Trained to Perform Percept Deprivation Tasks?

“…Overall, the results of the current study support the findings of previous research suggesting that young preschool children struggle to interpose a portable screen between an object and an observer (Flavell et al, 1978;McGuigan & Doherty, 2002). The exciting finding here is that these percept-deprivation abilities can arise months earlier when using the novel paradigm of exposing children to a task that is within their capabilities before presenting them with a more challenging variation of the task.…”

“…For example, children can judge what an observer is looking at when the observer's head and eyes are congruent (Doherty & Anderson, 1999). These children can also deprive an observer of the sight of an object by placing the object behind an occluder (Flavell, Shipstead, & Croft, 1978;McGuigan & Doherty, 2002), or by sliding a screen along a set of runners in front of the object (Lempers, Flavell, & Flavell, 1977).…”

“…Children cannot accurately diagnose which of four objects an observer is looking at when the observer's head and eyes are incongruent (Doherty & Anderson, 1999;McGuigan & Doherty, 2002), nor can they place a portable screen between an object and an observer to deny the observer sight of the object (Flavell et al, 1978;McGuigan & Doherty, 2002). McGuigan and Doherty (2002) suggested that the variations of the tasks that children can complete require a more simplistic understanding of attention in terms of engagement, rather than an adult-like understanding.…”

Children's Understanding of Informational Access as Source of Knowledge

“…Even 2-year-olds correctly assess whether another person has visual access to an object (Flavell, Shipstead, & Croft, 1978). Developmentally, the nonepistemic meaning of "to see" is acquired first.…”

The rapid development of explicit gaze judgment ability at 3years

“…However, children are unable to hide the object by moving the occluder until they are 3 years old (Flavell et al 1978), and this ability is associated with their ability to make explicit gaze judgments (McGuigan & Doherty, 2002).…”