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Melissa Allen (Lancaster University) Project student: Sarah Bronk (University of Bristol) Background Children are exposed to pictures and drawing from a very young age, and will happily name even their own early attempts at drawing. Indeed, they often insist that their scribble is a great drawing of, for example, a horse. Their intent to draw a horse means that their drawing, however poorly it comes out, depicts a horse.As adults, we understand that a given picture can be ambiguous. A circle can be a drawing of a sun, a cookie, a plate, or even a hole. Do children have this same flexibility in their understanding of drawings, or do they rigidly stick to the artist's intent? Under what conditions will children show representational flexibility by agreeing that an ambiguous drawing can be labeled by two different names? Will children use the same symbol to represent two different real-world objects?
We presented 3- and 4-year-old children with ambiguous drawings (e.g., a circle on top of a line could be a balloon or a lollipop). Over several experiments, we asked children questions about these drawings to explore their understanding of how they could be labeled and what they depicted. Under some conditions, children would rigidly insist that the drawing could only have one label (e.g., it could only be a balloon), but under other conditions, they were happy to accept multiple labels for the same drawing (e.g., we could call it a balloon or a lollipop). We are running follow-up experiments to explore these findings, to investigate the role of the artist's intent in children's willingness to change the label for a picture, and to probe whether children's representational flexibility might be related to other cognitive skills. In a second research project, we are exploring children's use of pictures as symbols. We are asking 3- and 4-year-old children to pick out an object based on a drawing. Are children able to use the same drawing as a symbol for multiple objects? Watch this space to find out!
Presentations and Publications
Nurmsoo, E., Allen, M. P., & Freeman, N. F. (in prep). Children's representational flexibility when understanding drawings. Unpublished manuscript Nurmsoo, E., Allen, M. & Freeman, N. (April 2009). Can a balloon be a lollipop? Four-year-olds use representational flexibility when understanding pictures. Poster to be presented at the Society for Research in Child Development Meeting, Denver, CO. Nurmsoo, E. (June 2005). Preschoolers reason about the artist's mental representations when naming a drawing. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, Vancouver, Canada. |
