The Credible Shrinking Room: Very Young Children's Performance With Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Relations

Abstract

Becoming a proficient symbol user is a universal developmental task in the first years of life, but detecting and mentally representing symbolic relations can be quite challenging for young children To test the extent to which symbolic reasoning per se is problematic, we compared the performance of 2 1/2-year-olds in symbolic and nonsymbolic versions of a search task. The children had to use their knowledge of the location of a toy hidden in a room to draw an inference about where to find a miniature toy in a scale model of the room (and vice versa) Children in the nonsymbolic condition believed a shrinking machine had caused the room to become the model They were much more successful than children in the symbolic condition, for whom the model served as a symbol of the room The results provide strong support for the role of dual representation in symbol understanding and use.