Two-Year-Olds Appreciate the Dual Nature of Pictures

Paintings and drawings are both symbolic representations and material objects da Vinci's Mona Lisa is at the same time a woman with an enigmatic smile and a canvas covered with strokes of paint. duality, long recognized and studied by philosophers, psychologists, and artists (Bloom & Markson, 1998; Gombrich, 1960; Ittelson, 1996), may be difficult for children to understand. Young children naturally pictures. If they see a line drawing of a whisk, for instance, and hear it named (This is a whisk), they later extend the name to real-world whisks, not to other drawings (Preissler & Carey, 2004). However, they may not appreciate, as adults do, that the drawing is itself an object, a vehicle through which a whisk is represented. Indeed, young children sometimes treat a representation as if it were the represented object, as when trying to shake a picture of a rattle or step into a picture of a shoe (DeLoache, Pierroutsakos, Uttal, Rosengren, & Gottlieb, 1998; Perner, 1991). In the studies reported here, we explored whether, when presented with a suitably simplified task, 2-year-olds can flexibly see pictures both as representational and as objects in their own right. In our first study, we tested thirty 2-year-old children (mean age = 30 months). Each trial involved four items an unfamiliar object, a line drawing of that object, a second unfamiliar object, and a line drawing of second object. In one condition, the experimenter pointed to one of the drawings, described it with a novel word, and asked subjects to generalize the word: for example, This is a wug. you show me another one? In another condition, the experimenter asked the same question without using a new label: Look at this. you show me another one? For adults, common nouns refer to kinds of objects (see Bloom, 2000), and so the wug question should be taken as applying not to the picture, but to what the picture depicts, and hence should be extended to the corresponding object. In contrast, the look at this question is more likely to be taken as simply referring to the picture itself, and is therefore more likely to b x ended to the other picture. These were the children's in uitions as well. When asked to show another wug, they chose the corresponding object 90% (27/30) of the time; when not given a word, they chose the corresponding object only 30% of the time (9/30) a significant difference between conditions indicating reliable, opposite effects (27/30, z = 3.45, prep = .985; 9/30, z = -2.36, prep = .875). effect of a novel word is consiste t with other findings concerning the role of language in facilitating c tegorization by young children (Waxman & Booth, 2003; Xu, 2002). In a second study, we used a simpler design to test twenty 2year-olds (mean age = 30 months), by showing them a line drawing depicting a novel object and making a statement about the drawing: (a) This is a dax, (b) My sister has in her house, (c) This is really neat, (d) 'This is my favorite, or (e) My brother keeps in his wallet. The first two statements were intended to apply to the object that the picture represented, the last was intended to apply better to the picture itself, and the r maining two applied well to both the object and the picture. After the statement was presented, the experimenter brought out the bject that the drawing depicted, placed it next to the drawing, and asked which item (items) the property in the statement applied to (e.g., Can you show me the one my sister has in h r house?) the drawing, the object, or both. We also tested 20 adults with the same design, telling them that we were validatin a paradigm used with children. The results are shown in Figure 1. Note first that we replicated he finding of the first study: When a picture is named, children (and adults) assume the label refers to a represented object. Both groups associated the dax and house statements mostly with objects, the wallet statement mostly with pictures, and the other two statements both with pictures and with objects. For child n, the difference between the average score of the dax and house trials and the average score of the wallet trial was significant, paired two-tailed t test, t(\9) = 2.90, prep = .96, d = 1.33, as it was for adults, paired two-tailed t test, t(19) = 3.76, Prep = -99, d = 1.72. A between-subjects analysis of variance indicated there was no significant difference between the difference scores of children and of adults, F(l, 38) = 0.017,prep = .192, r|2 < .001. suggests that children, like adults, Address correspondence to Melissa Allen Preissler, University of Edinburgh, PPLS 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, United Kingdom, e-mail: melissa.preissler@ed.ac.uk.