Dual representation (psychology)
As children get older, they acquire what DeLoache calls Dual Representation, in which they understand the symbolic meaning in an object.
DeLoache was studying toddler memory and was beginning a new experiment with two-and-a-half and three-year-old children using a model of a room in her lab.
The results were very surprising – the children did very poorly which changed DeLoache's thinking, shifting her research from memory to what she calls dual representation.
Though pictures are some of the simplest form of symbols for adults to comprehend, infants struggle with them and are observed to manually explore them.
Judy DeLoache, David Uttal, Sophia, Pierroutsakos, and Karl Rosengren studied this by placing books containing very realistic color photographs in front of nine-month-old children.
They found that every child in the study attempted to interact with the pictures as if they were the objects they represented, suggesting that symbolic thinking is not intuitive.
[2] Researchers have also noted that the observed behavior does not indicate a failure to discriminate between pictures and the real objects they depict.
Children exhibit more manual exploration with photographs versus line drawings and with color pictures more than black and white.
[4] Many variations on the original task retrieval experiment have been conducted using three-year-old and two-and-a-half-year-old children, yielding very different results between the two groups.
This is very interesting as it contradicts current literature that shows pictures to be less effective than 3D models in cognitive activities such as learning and memory.
These results show that, for young children, dual representation is more easily achieved using 2D pictures than 3D models.
This observation led researchers to believe it was the simplicity of the pictures in relation to the model room that contributed to the success of children in completing the retrieval task.
The two-and-a-half-year-old children then watched an experimenter hide a miniature toy under one of the model-sized pieces of furniture and were then asked to find the larger version in the life-sized room.
In another study, the symbolic object was made more accessible to the children with the expectation that dual representation would be more difficult to achieve.
The researchers found that the two-and-a-half-year-olds performed poorly on the first task using the standard model, just as expected from previous experiments.
However, other researchers suggest using concrete objects as a teaching aid may not help children learn symbolic representations and may even distract them from the subject matter.
Behaviors known as scale errors were observed in which the children attempted to interact with the miniature objects in the same way they had with the larger versions.
[10] Dual representation has been exhibited in certain animal species such as rats, dolphins, parrots, monkeys and chimpanzees.
[11] Other studies have shown that both humans and animals use symbolic cognition to map spaces around them and locate certain objects, an ability necessary for survival.
