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.     

TV guide: two-year-old children learn to use video as a source of information

Learning to use symbols is a challenge for young children even when the symbol in question (e.g., a live video image) is iconic and seems transparent to adults. This research examined the effect of experience on children's use of video-presented information. Two-year-old children saw themselves "live" on their family television for 2 weeks and then participated in an object-retrieval task. The children reliably used a live video presentation of an adult hiding a toy in an adjoining room to find the toy. Most also transferred what they learned to a task involving another symbol (pictures) that typically is very difficult for this age group. The results reveal flexibility in 2-year-olds' symbol use that follows from successful representation of a symbolic relation.     

Naturalistic Experience and the Early Use of Symbolic Artifacts

Experience with a variety of symbolic artifacts has been proposed as a mechanism underlying symbolic development. In this study, the parents of 120 2-year-old children who participated in symbolic object retrieval tasks completed a questionnaire regarding their children's naturalistic experience with symbolic artifacts and activities. In separate regressions predicting children's use of video and pictures for information in experimental tasks, predictor variables such as children's exposure to live video and their emerging understanding of graphic representation were significant, even after accounting for the effects of children's vocabulary and birth order and parents' education and occupation. The results support the role of experience in children's early detection of symbolic relations.     

Video Versus Reality: Infants' Attention and Affective Responses to Video and Live Presentations

Television viewing by infants has become very common, yet relatively little is known about infants' reactions to video compared to live events. We conducted two experiments in order to compare 9- or 10-month-old infants' behavioral reactions to live events and video presentations of those events. In the first experiment, infants' were shown video and live presentations shown consecutively; their affective reactions were consistent, indicating that video conveys meaning and emotional impact even in infancy. However, infants generally looked longer at, reached more to, showed more interest in, and exhibited more fear to the real stimuli. In a second experiment, infants were shown identical live and video events simultaneously; they looked much longer at the live presentations, further confirming that they distinguished live events from video and preferred to watch real events. Implications for infants' television viewing and the use of video images in infancy research are discussed.     

Is it life or is it Memorex? Video as a representation of reality

This paper offers an overview of research on infants’ early behavior toward televised images, followed by an account of the development of representational competence with video. Several aspects of representation are involved in young children’s understanding and use of video. From a very young age, children form mental representations of the contents of video, making sense of realistic images of familiar things. Children also notice and represent information regarding video itself (e.g., its 2-dimensionality). An important development occurs when children represent the relation between video and reality: at first, toddlers appear to categorize video as separate from reality, but eventually children recognize realistic video images as physical representations (symbols) of events they have not directly perceived. A mature representation of video takes into account genre (e.g., news, drama) and reality status based on recognition that video can (but does not always) represent real events.     

Aspects of Young Children's Perceptions of Gender-Typed Occupations

Perceived competencies of men and women in gender-typed occupations, perceptions about how much money men and women earn in gender-typed occupations, and affective reactions regarding growing up to have gender-typed occupations were examined in 55 primarily White middle-class preschoolers and primary school children. Children (particularly boys) viewed men as more competent than women in masculine occupations, and rated women as more competent than men in feminine occupations. Children believed men earned more than women across occupations, but that men earned more money than women in masculine occupations, and women earned more money than men in feminine occupations. Children's affective reactions to growing up to have gender-role-consistent occupations were more positive than their reactions to having gender-role-inconsistent occupations. Results suggest children perceive differential competencies of men and women regarding gender-typed occupations, and differences in pay for men and women within gender-typed occupations, at ages younger than previously determined.     

Symbols and Similarity: You Can Get Too Much of a Good Thing

A method for eliciting extended explanations was used to evaluate predictions from the “theory-theory” account of developing psychological reasoning. Children were repeatedly asked to explain the actions or emotions of story characters with false beliefs. Questioning elicited false belief attributions in half of 3-year-olds (Study 1, N = 16, age M = 3;6) and most 4-year-olds who failed belief prediction tasks (Study 2, N = 30, M = 4;5). In Study 3, 30 prediction failers (M = 5;1) gave significantly more false belief explanations for emotions than for actions. Across the studies, desire and emotion explanations emerged early and often, reflecting the primacy of these constructs in the children's understanding of psychological causality. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for developmental mechanism.     

Preschoolers use speakers’ preferences to learn words

In two studies, we investigated preschoolers’ ability to use others’ preferences to learn names for things. Two studies demonstrated that preschool children make smart use of others’ preferences. In the first study, preschool children only used information about others’ preferences when they were clearly linked to referential intentions. The second study established that children only used others’ preferences to learn words when the preference and intention information came from the same person. Both studies reveal impressive use of mental state information for word learning purposes.     

Family Centred Brief Solution-focused Therapy with Chronic Schizophrenia: a Pilot Study

The purpose of the study was to pilot a family centred brief solution-focused therapy model (BSFT) with families and clients diagnosed with schizophrenia. A control group of clients and their families received traditional outpatient therapy, while an experimental group of clients and their families were treated with a BSFT model. All participants were pre-tested and then post-tested with the Family Environment Scale after five therapy sessions over a ten-week period. Significant differences between the groups were found on expressiveness, active-recreational orientation, moral-religious emphasis and family incongruence. The participation of families and clients with schizophrenia in family centred brief solution-focused therapy produced encouraging results and demonstrated the need for expanded studies using BSFT with other chronically mentally ill clients and their families.