IRICE   05408
INSTITUTO ROSARIO DE INVESTIGACIONES EN CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACION
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Artist?s intention facilitates twenty-four-month-old-children?s understanding of drawings as symbols
Autor/es:
VIVALDI, ROMINA A.; SALSA, ANALÍA M.
Lugar:
Chicago
Reunión:
Congreso; 43rd Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society: Social Development: Current Trends & Perspectives; 2013
Institución organizadora:
Jean Piaget Society (JPS)
Resumen:
Drawings constitute a kind of external representation that children in western cultures are exposed to very early in life. Previous research has shown that children understand and use drawings in match-to-symbol tasks or object retrieval tasks at 30 months of age (Callaghan, 1999; DeLoache, 1991; DeLoache & Burns, 1994; Salsa, 2012).A privileged route towards the understanding of graphic symbols is to infer the intentions of their creators (Bloom & Markson, 1998; Gelman & Ebeling, 1998; Preissler & Bloom, 2008). Freeman (2008) argued that understanding pictures involves mastering a complex set of relations among the picture, the artist, the viewer and the state of affairs and that reasoning about these relations entails understanding the intentions of both the artist and the viewer. Preissler and Bloom (2008) found that when an adult artist drew an object, 30-month-olds latter mapped a novel name for the drawing to the object that the adult had been looking at when the drawing was created. In the current research we tested the premise that younger children, 24-month-olds, would be able to grasp the symbolic nature of drawings if they were provided with more explicit cues to artist?s intention. Our main prediction was that 24-month-old children need not only to see the adult drawing while she is watching the referent (non-linguistic cues) but also need the adult to give them verbal descriptions about her drawing actions (linguistic cues) to solve a matching task. Thirty-two children (18 boys and 14 girls; range = 23-25 months) of a middle-class background participated in Study 1. They were randomly assigned in two groups: intention (n = 16, M = 24. 5 months, 9 boys, 7 girls) and no intention (n = 16, M = 23.9 months, 9 boys, 7 girls). Following a 10 minutes warm-up period, the experimenter presented five identical cardboard boxes and a set of five simple toys that could be portrayed with circles and lines. In the intention condition, the experimenter explained she was going to draw the toys and put each drawing into a box to let the children know where they had to put the toys later. After that, the experimenter drew each object for 10 s, while she was looking at the toy. Subsequently, she took one object at time, matched each object with its picture, said ?This is my drawing for this toy? and described her graphic actions: ?To draw this toy, I made a big circle for this ball (e.g., object 1)?. Finally, the test began. The experimenter presented five trials, one for each object, and recorded the children?s box choices. The order of presentation of the objects was randomized across participants. In the no intention condition, children had to relate pre-drawn adult?s drawings with their referents. After presenting the experimental materials, the experimenter simply explained: ?You?ll have to keep each toy in its corresponding box. You?ll know where to keep the toys because each box has a drawing inside?. The procedure of the test phase was the same as in the intention condition. The results of Study 1 provide a strong support for the claim that it is possible to promote symbolic understanding at 24 months of age if children receive explicit cues to artist?s intention. Children in the intention condition successfully matched the symbol with its referent 75% of the time whereas children in the no intention condition had a performance of 31%. The difference between the two groups was significant, U=23.5, p<.001. We conducted a second study in order to examining whether non-linguistic and linguistic cues to intention would have a differential impact on the subsequent performance of 24-month-olds´ in the matching task. Twenty-eight children (15 boys and 13 girls; range = 23-25 months) were included in Study 2. They were divided into two groups: non-linguistic (n = 14, M = 24.6 months, 8 boys, 6 girls) and linguistic (n = 14, M = 24.9 months, 7 boys, 7 girls). The procedure was the same as in the intention condition of Study 1, except that in the non- linguistic condition children only watched the experimenter drawing the objects and in the linguistic condition the drawings were pre-made and they only received verbal scripts about artist´s intention. Results show that linguistic cues have a better impact on children performance than non-linguistic cues. In the linguistic condition, children matched the objects with the correct drawings 61% of the time, while children in the non-linguistic condition only did it 33% of the time. The performance of children in the linguistic condition was significantly different from the performance in the non-linguistic condition (U = 53.5, p<.05). Comparing across experiments, performance in the intention condition was significantly different than performance in the non-linguistic condition (U = 29.5, p<.001). No significant differences were found between the intention and linguistic conditions (U = 90.5, p>.05), and between the no intention and non-linguistic conditions (U = 108, p>.05). Finally, performance of children in the no intention condition was significantly different from performance in the linguistic condition (U = 54.5, p<.05).   The major finding reported here is that 24-month-old children can correctly match a referent with its drawing when they receive linguistic cues to artist?s intention. Non-linguistic cues, specifically direction of gaze while the adult is drawing, are not explicit enough for 24-month-olds to solve the task. Linguistic cues facilitates early understanding of drawings as symbols because language puts young children in a position to begin taking advantage of all kinds of social skills by understanding the communicative intentions of others in joint attentional scenes (Tomasello, 1999).Furthermore, language supports the ability to dually represent the pictures as both an object and a representation, providing a means for creating cognitive distance (Homer & Nelson, 2009).