2～3岁儿童对视频信息的理解

选取2岁、2．5岁和3岁儿童72名,比较儿童通过窗口、视频和模型三种条件观看藏玩具过程,然后正确找到玩具的表现,考察了2～3岁儿童对视频信息的理解特点。结果表明：（1）与通过直接经验获得信息相比,2岁与2.5岁儿童从视频获得表征信息存有一定困难;3岁儿童能够顺利地从视频获得并运用表征信息。（2）2～3岁儿童在视频条件下获取表征信息的能力要强于模型条件。研究认为3岁前儿童完成将视频图像视为真实物向视为表征信息的转换,双重表征并非儿童将视频图像作为表征信息加以理解的先决条件。     

Symbolic Insight and Inhibitory Control: Two Problems Facing Young Children on Symbolic Retrieval Tasks

Many recent studies have explored young children's ability to use information from physical representations of space to guide search within the real world. In one commonly used procedure, children are asked to find a hidden toy in a room after observing a smaller toy being hidden in the analogous location in a scale model of the room. Three-year-old children readily find the hidden toy, although children at 2.5 years often have difficulty with the task. This experiment examined the causes of 2.5-year-olds' difficultly with this symbol system by incorporating testing procedures previously used with chimpanzees. Results indicate that young children's poor performance primarily stems from a difficulty achieving symbolic insight (i.e., recognizing the model-room representational relationship) but is also strongly affected by deficits in inhibitory control.     

The Blicket Within: Preschoolers' Inferences About Insides and Causes

Four experiments examined children's inferences about the relation between objects' internal parts and their causal properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds recognized that objects with different internal parts had different causal properties, and those causal properties transferred if the internal part moved to another object. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds made inferences from an object's internal parts to its causal properties without being given verbal labels for objects or being shown that insides and causal properties covaried. Experiment 3 found that 4-year-olds chose an object with the same internal part over one with the same external property when asked which object had the same causal property as the target (which had both the internal part and external property). Finally, Experiment 4 demonstrated that 4-year-olds made similar inferences from causal properties to internal parts, but 3-year-olds relied more on objects' external perceptual appearance. These results suggest that by the age of 4, children have developed an understanding of a relation between an artifact's internal parts and its causal properties.     

Are eyes windows to a deceiver's soul? Children's use of another's eye gaze cues in a deceptive situation

Three experiments examined 3- to 5-year-olds' use of eye gaze cues to infer truth in a deceptive situation. Children watched a video of an actor who hid a toy in 1 of 3 cups. In Experiments 1 and 2, the actor claimed ignorance about the toy's location but looked toward 1 of the cups, without (Experiment 1) and with (Experiment 2) head movement. In Experiment 3, the actor provided contradictory verbal and eye gaze clues about the location of the toy. Four- and 5-year-olds correctly used the actor's gaze cues to locate the toy, whereas 3-year-olds failed to do so. Results suggest that by 4 years of age, children begin to understand that eye gaze cues displayed by a deceiver can be informative about the true state of affairs.     

Two-Year-Olds' Object Retrieval Based on Television: Testing a Perceptual Account

Two-year-olds frequently fail to use information provided by video to find objects hidden in an adjacent room. Schmitt and Anderson (2002) hypothesized that they fail to map the 2-dimensional (2D) video image onto the 3D layout of the search space. Two experiments tested whether 2-year-olds can successfully use information from video when the search space is 2D or when the information is provided verbally (by telling the child where the toy is hidden). In both experiments, children performed poorly in the video conditions but performed well in direct live experience comparison conditions, contradicting Schmitt and Anderson's hypothesis. Performance was above chance on the first trial in the video conditions, suggesting that 2-year-olds do have a memory of the hiding location, albeit one that is easily disrupted by perseverative errors on subsequent trials. Overall, the results are most consistent with the hypothesis that very young children give priority to direct experience over mediated information.     

Contexts of a person's prior intentions facilitate observational learning in 2.5-year-old children

We examined whether contexts suggesting an actor's prior intentions facilitate observational learning in 2.5-year-olds. In Experiment 1, children observed an experimenter handle one box before proceeding to open a second box. In two prior intention conditions, children either watched the experimenter extract a toy from the first box or saw that the box had already been opened. In two no prior intention conditions, children watched the demonstration with only the second box or paired with irrelevant actions upon the first box. Children successfully opened the second box more often in the two prior intention conditions than in the two no prior intention conditions. Experiment 2 investigated stimulus generalization as another explanation for these results. A functionally different trap-tube task served as the pre-demonstration apparatus. Before watching the experimenter open the box, children either saw her extract a toy from the tube with a stick or observed the toy accidentally fall from the opening. In both cases, children opened the box at similar high rates. We discuss children's use of others’ prior intentions or observable outcomes in observational learning.     

Young children's use of scale models: testing an alternative to representational insight

Using a symbolic object such as a model as a source of information about something else requires some appreciation of the relation between the symbol and what it represents. Representational insight has been proposed as essential to success in a symbolic retrieval task in which children must use information from a hiding event in a scale model to find a toy hidden in a room. The two studies reported here examine and reject a proposed alternative account for success in the model task. The results with 2.5-year-olds and 3-year-olds show that children's successful use of a scale model cannot be attributed to the simple detection of the correspondences between the objects in the two spaces. A higher-level representation of the model-room relation (i.e. representational insight) is required. The results are discussed with respect to the coalescence of multiple factors in determining performance in the model task.     

The role of perseveration in children's symbolic understanding and skill

In the first few years of life, children become increasingly sensitive to the significance of a variety of symbolic artifacts. An extensive body of research has explored very young children's ability to use symbol‐based information as a guide to current reality. In one common task, for example, children watch as a miniature toy is hidden in a scale model, and are then asked to retrieve a larger version of the toy from the corresponding place in the room itself. Two‐and‐a‐half‐year‐old children perform very poorly in most versions of this task. Their most common error is to perseverate; that is, they search again at the location where the toy was last hidden. Two studies examined the degree to which 2¹/₂‐year‐olds’ high rate of perseveration and poor performance stem from problems with inhibitory control. Results showed that problems with inhibitory control contribute very little to 2¹/₂‐year‐old children's difficulty with the task. Instead, the results confirm young children's great difficulty appreciating and exploiting symbol–referent relations.     

Getting a clear picture: young children's understanding of a televised image

Previous research has established that very young children, unlike older people, often have difficulty using a televised image as a source of information about a real event. After watching on a live video monitor as an adult in the next room hid a toy, 2‐year‐olds usually did not find it, but after watching directly through a window, children of this age succeeded. In the first experiment reported here, 2‐year‐olds could see hiding events directly and on a video monitor at the same time. This video–reality training did not improve performance on subsequent standard trials with video as the only source of information. In a second experiment, an adult demonstrated correct search behavior using video, finding a toy as the child watched on the video monitor. Despite this training and assistance, most of the children did not appear to recognize the connection between a video image and reality.     

The effects of interacting in repeated events on children's eyewitness memory and source monitoring

Accurate eyewitness memory of an event may be affected by exposure to and degree of involvement with other related events. In this study, we investigated whether interacting in a related video event affected children's accounts of a real-life target event, and whether interacting in the target event affected memory for different details within the target event. Four-, 6-, and 9-year-old children interacted with an adult who made a puppet. Half of the children in each age group also interacted with a video of a similar event (interactive condition) and half sat and watched the video without interacting (watch condition). When asked non-misleading questions a week later, children in the interactive condition confused the two events more than those in the watch condition. The 4-year-olds in the interactive condition reported a higher rate of confusions in free recall than the 4-year-olds in the watch condition. There were no effects of interaction on responses to misleading questions. The 6- and 9-year-olds were more accurate at answering questions related to actions they themselves had performed than actions performed by the experimenter, although this pattern was reversed for the 4-year-olds. The results are discussed in terms of children's eyewitness memory. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Older children's misunderstanding of uncertain belief after passing the false belief test

A four-location belief task was designed to examine children's understanding of another's uncertain belief after passing a false belief (FB) task. In Experiment 1, after passing the FB task, participants were asked what a puppet would do after he failed to find his toy at the falsely believed location. Most 4-year-olds and half of 6-year-olds children who passed the FB test showed difficulty in handling uncertain belief; answering that the puppet would then look for his toy at the current (moved-to) location. Eight-year-old children and adults all recognized that the puppet would look for the toy everywhere, or at random. In Experiment 2, 4- and 6-year-olds were presented two other search tasks; it was shown that preschoolers could use search strategies to solve a similar search problem when FB was not involved. This new aspect of post-FB understanding can be interpreted in terms of limited understanding of uncertainty in a less-knowledgeable individual and of limited ability to infer the consequences of belief-disconfirmation.     

Preschoolers monitor the relative accuracy of informants

In 2 studies, the sensitivity of 3- and 4-year-olds to the previous accuracy of informants was assessed. Children viewed films in which 2 informants labeled familiar objects with differential accuracy (across the 2 experiments, children were exposed to the following rates of accuracy by the more and less accurate informants, respectively: 100% vs. 0%, 100% vs. 25%, 75% vs. 0%, and 75% vs. 25%). Next, children watched films in which the same 2 informants provided conflicting novel labels for unfamiliar objects. Children were asked to indicate which of the 2 labels was associated with each object. Three-year-olds trusted the more accurate informant only in conditions in which 1 of the 2 informants had been 100% accurate, whereas 4-year-olds trusted the more accurate informant in all conditions tested. These results suggest that 3-year-olds mistrust informants who make a single error, whereas 4-year-olds track the relative frequency of errors when deciding whom to trust.     

"Really? She Blicked the Baby?": Two-Year-Olds Learn Combinatorial Facts About Verbs by Listening

ABSTRACT— Children use syntax to guide verb learning. We asked whether the syntactic structure in which a novel verb occurs is meaningful to children even without a concurrent scene from which to infer the verb's semantic content. In two experiments, 2-year-olds observed dialogues in which interlocutors used a new verb in transitive ("Jane blicked the baby!") or intransitive ("Jane blicked!") sentences. The children later heard the verb in isolation ("Find blicking!") while watching a one-participant event and a two-participant event presented side by side. Children who had heard transitive dialogues looked reliably longer at the two-participant event than did those who had heard intransitive dialogues. This effect persisted even when children were tested on a different day, but disappeared when no novel verb accompanied the test events ( Experiment 2 ). Thus, 2-year-olds gather useful combinatorial information about a novel verb simply from hearing it in sentences, and later retrieve that information to guide interpretation of the verb.     

Long-term memory and retrieval at ages 2, 3, 4

Two experiments are reported examining the contents and accessibility of a subset of the knowledge represented in long-term memory by very young children. In Experiment 1, children aged 2 to 4 were asked in a production task to name items commonly found in particular rooms in a house, and then to verify the appropriate locations of a set of miniature replicas of household items in a dollhouse. In Experiment 2, object context was manipulated to observe if further external context improves or changes production. Children 3 and 4 years old were asked to produce appropriate room items under one of three conditons: either presented no room objects as in the first experiment, or given room objects highly- or less-frequently associated in the first study.Very young children revealed considerable knowledge in this domain, and even at the youngest ages, core defining information was retrieved. It was equally clear, however, that young children know much more than they can produce, that there is noticeable improvement in ability to retrieve information over this age range, and that additional external object context does not necessarily facilitate retrieval from long-term memory.     

Developments in source monitoring: the role of thinking of others

Adults' source judgments are more accurate when they focus on speakers' emotions than when adults focus on their own emotions. Focusing on speakers may lead to better source memory because it encourages processing of the perceptual characteristics of the source and binding of that information to the content of what is being said. The purpose of the current work was to evaluate whether young children's source memory similarly benefits from this outward encoding focus and whether this effect changes developmentally. In Experiment 1, when 4- and 5-year-olds heard an audiotape of two dissimilar speakers, only the 5-year-olds showed better source memory when asked to adopt an other-focus. In Experiment 2, when 4- and 5-year-olds watched a videotape of two similar speakers, the same pattern was found. However, in Experiment 3, when 4-year-olds watched a videotape of two dissimilar speakers (a more optimal encoding condition in which 5-year-olds showed ceiling performance), 4-year-olds benefited from taking an other-focus during encoding. Overall, the data suggest that the benefit for source memory of focusing on another person develops over the preschool years.     

Young children's storage behavior in a memory-for-location task

Two experiments concerned with children's intentional preparation for future retrieval in a memory-for-location task are presented. In the first experiment, 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds were instructed to store and subsequently retrieve an object on a large spatial display. All age groups, except the 3-year-olds, tended to store the object at distinctive locations and their retrieval performance was facilitated accordingly. The four age groups did not differ in the types of selections made in a nonmemory control task. The second experiment dealt with the effects of feedback and informational factors on strategy acquisition. Preschoolers were given experience at retrieving the object from distinctive and nondistinctive positions on the stimulus display. Later, when instructed to store the object by themselves, older preschoolers produced the distinctive-position storage strategy following a feedback procedure in which they directly observed the consequences of their retrieval selections. The strategy was adopted by younger preschoolers, but only when additional strategy and task information accompanied visual feedback. The use of external memory tasks with young children and factors affecting strategy acquisition and utilization are discussed.     

Children's working understanding of knowledge sources: Confidence in knowledge gained from testimony

In three experiments, children aged between 3 and 5 years (N = 38, 52, 94; mean ages 3–7 to 5–2) indicated their confidence in their knowledge of the identity of a hidden toy. With the exception of some 3-year-olds, children revealed working understanding of their knowledge source by showing high confidence when they had seen or felt the toy, and lower confidence when they had been told its identity by an apparently well-informed speaker. Correct explicit source reports were not necessary for children to show relative uncertainty when the speaker subsequently doubted the adequacy of his access to the toy. After a 2-min delay, 3–4-year-olds, unlike 4–5-year-olds, failed to see the implications of the speaker's doubt about his access.     

Imitation from television by 24‐ and 30‐month‐olds

Infants’ imitation of complex actions was examined in three experiments with 24‐ and 30‐month‐olds. In all experiments, an adult modeled a series of actions with novel stimuli and the infant's reproduction of those actions was assessed either immediately or after a 24‐hour delay. Some infants watched the demonstration live, while other infants watched the same demonstration on television from a pre‐recorded videotape. Both 24‐ and 30‐month‐olds imitated actions that had been modeled on television; however, their performance was consistently inferior to that of infants of the same age who watched the demonstration live.     

Dealing with conflicting information: young children's reliance on what they see versus what they are told

Children often learn about the world through direct observation. However, much of children's knowledge is acquired through the testimony of others. This research investigates how preschoolers weigh these two sources of information when they are in conflict. Children watched as an adult hid a toy in one location. Then the adult told children that the toy was in a different location (i.e. false testimony). When retrieving the toy, 4- and 5-year-olds relied on what they had seen and disregarded the adult's false testimony. However, most 3-year-olds deferred to the false testimony, despite what they had directly observed. Importantly, with a positive searching experience based on what they saw, or with a single prior experience with an adult as unreliable, 3-year-olds subsequently relied on their first-hand observation and disregarded the adult's false testimony. Thus, young children may initially be credulous toward others' false testimony that contradicts their direct observation, but skepticism can develop quickly through experience.