When Representation Becomes Reality: Interactive Digital Media and Children’s Use of Symbols

• In Event: 1-054 - Emerging Perspectives on Cognitive and Social Development in Virtual Spaces

Integrative Statement

For young children, one challenge in using objects as symbols is what DeLoache (1987, 1995, 2002) termed dual representation: the need to mentally represent both the characteristics of the object itself, and the “stands for” relation to its referent. In DeLoache’s classic scale model task, a child sees a small toy being hidden someplace in a scale model (e.g., behind the couch), and must find a larger toy hidden “in the same place” in a full-sized room. The child never sees the hiding event in the room; the only way to know the larger toy’s location is to recognize that events in the model stands for/provide information about events in the room. For 2 ½-year-olds, the relation between the two spaces is opaque; they tend to treat finding the toy in the big room as a guessing game. DeLoache explained this failure as stemming from the interest children have in the model as a toy; focusing on its “objectness”, children fail to realize that the model has a communicative role in the searching game. Children of this age succeed at the task with pictures (photographs, line drawings); because pictures are relatively uninteresting to them as objects, children seem to recognize their role of conveying information about something else.

This talk will address how the interactive nature of current digital media (touchscreens, augmented reality, video chat) blurs the line between representation and referent, making it easier for people of all ages to confabulate image with reality. Important questions include:

-- Does a representation that a child acts on or interacts with lose its representational role of standing for/bringing to mind something other than itself?

-- Does acting directly on an image (e.g. tapping, clicking, dragging) make an image more object-like, drawing attention to the image itself while distracting children from seeing the connection between image and potential real-world referents?

-- How might interactivity complicate the way that developmental psychologists think about symbols/representations?

-- How might interactivity affect children’s developing symbol understanding and use?

Data from studies with live video, video chat, and touchscreens will illustrate these points. In one study, 132 toddlers (24 & 30 months) were taught a novel word in 1 of 4 conditions: responsive live (a speaker was present and engaged with children); unresponsive video (a speaker on video looked at the camera and smiled at scripted times); unresponsive live (although present, the speaker behaved as she did on the unresponsive video), and responsive video (a speaker on closed-circuit video engaged with children, as in video chat). Children of both ages reliably learned the word in the responsive live condition (older, p=.002; younger, p=.045), and older children learned in the unresponsive live condition, p=.007. Neither group learned in the responsive or unresponsive video conditions.

The results show that adding social cues to video via video chat did not support learning in this case. Rather, toddlers’ transfer and generalization of words from video chat may depend on co-viewers who scaffold their learning from this new kind of representation.

Author

• Georgene Troseth, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author