The effect of enactive experience and symbolic representation in emerging cardinal knowledge

RODRÍGUEZ, JIMENA; SALSA, ANALÍA M.; MARTÍ, EDUARDO

Atenas

Congreso; 19th European Conference on Developmental Psychology; 2019

European Association for Developmental Psychology (EADP)

The study presented in this communication examines the impact of enactive experiences with concrete representations of quantity (objects and pictures) on 3.5- and 4-year-old children?s performance when building collections of 1-6 tems. We adapted the Give-N task including three representations of quantity: sets of bottle caps, cards with dots and spoken number words. Children were assigned to one of two conditions, manipulation and observation; the main difference between them was whether enactive experiences with the caps and pictures were encouraged or not. The results show that 3.5-year- olds? erformance when producing sets of size 3 was clearly opposed by condition, with children succeeding with caps only in the observation group. In contrast, manipulation enhanced 4-year-olds? performance when producing sets size 4 with all symbolic modalities. Emerging cardinal knowledge seems to be influenced, not only by the kind of representations used by children, but also by their active involvement during the task.