Judy S. DeLoache, Ph.D. - US grants

The representational functioning of young children will be studied. The focus of the research will be the recognition and exploitation of correspondence--realizing that two objects or situations are related in some way and then using what is known about one of them to understand the other. The project will be especially concerned with symbolic representation, a type of correspondence that is uniquely human and that forms the basis for a substantial portion of human learning. Most of the proposed studies involve young children's understanding of the representational or symbolic role of scale models, i.e., with their awareness that a model represents or stands for a larger space and that anything known or learned about the model can be applied to that larger space. A Model is presented of young children's understanding of scale models, and the proposed experiments test predictions based it. The studies address four areas of interest. (1) One set of experiments will evaluate the "dual orientation" hypothesis--the suggestion that young children's difficulty with understanding and using scale models stems from the need to treat a model both as a real object and as a representation of something else. (2) A second group of experiments will examine factors hypothesized by the Model to be important in young children's understanding of models. Specific hypotheses will be tested regarding the effect of experience with other symbolic media, the role of physical similarity between a model and the space it represents, and the interaction among these and other variables. (3) Another set of studies will extend the research with scale models to other related domains-picture perception and symbolic play. (4) Developmental implications of the previous research with 2- and 3-year-olds will be examined in studies with older preschool children. The proposed research should enhance our knowledge of early cognitive development. In particular, we should learn more about the early development of symbolization, especially the development of the very important ability to learn or acquire new information via a symbolic medium.

The focus of the proposed research is the process by which young children acquire and extend new knowledge from picture book experiences, with the goal of identifying factors that facilitate or impede that process. Parents and preschool teachers assume that young children learn useful information from the books to which they are exposed and assume also that they generalize that information beyond the pages of the book. Surprisingly, little research has examined these basic assumptions. One goal of the project is to examine the effect of certain physical characteristics that are common in books designed and marketed for young children (e.g., how realistic the pictures in the books are and whether it matters if information is presented in an everyday context or a fantasy context). A second goal concerns the extent to which features that are known to facilitate or interfere with learning generally in young children (e.g., analogies and complex elements that can be physically manipulated) affect learning and generalization from books. A third goal is to examine book-centered interactions between parents and their preschool children to see how parents use books to communicate information to their children, with a particular focus on assessing the extent to which parents encourage generalization to the real world. Because joint book reading has the potential to serve as an excellent source of early knowledge about scientific concepts, these questions will be addressed in the context of children learning about various biological domains, beginning with animal-environment relations. The results of the proposed research should have clear and important implications for the selection and design of picture books to serve educational goals. Because young children in America are so frequently involved in picture book interactions, improvement in the educational potential of the books available in homes and preschools could have a broader impact across the social spectrum.

Two primary goals underlie the research proposed in this application. One is to learn more about the origins and early development of children's interest in and learning about the biological domain, a topic that has received remarkably little attention. The second, which will be pursued concurrently, is to directly examine whether young children's general STEM learning and memory is facilitated by situating it in the realm of biology. In pursuit of these goals, one set of studies will examine very young children's spontaneous reactions to animals, including live animals, as well as films and pictures of animals, compared to various inanimate stimuli. A second set will directly compare preschool children's performance on tasks employing animal and non-animal stimuli. Questions include: Do infants and very young children pay more attention to and show stronger emotional reactions to live animals than to inanimate comparison objects? Do infants find films of animate movement more interesting than the movement of inanimate objects? Can young children learn new information better when the to-be-learned material is situated in the biological domain; that is, can children's attraction to animals be leveraged to support the learning of other, non-biological information? If so, what formats are most effective for presenting the information? This research has the potential to make two types of contributions. First, it will advance our understanding of early conceptual development about the natural world. Second, gaining a better understanding of young children's attunement to the natural world will inform the design and assessment of educational materials for young children.