The development of children's knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction.

Recent research on the acquisition of knowledge about the important and pervasive appearance-reality distinction suggests the following course of development. Many 3-year-olds seem to possess little or no understanding of the distinction. They fail very easy-looking tests of this understanding and are unresponsive to training. At this age level, skill in solving simple appearancereality tasks is highly correlated with skill in solving simple visual perspective-taking tasks. This and other findings are consistent with the hypothesis that what helps children finally grasp the distinction is an increased cognizance of the fact that people are sentient subjects who have mental representations of objects and events. It does so by allowing them to understand that the selfsame stimulus can be mentally represented in two different, seemingly contradictory ways: (a) in the appearance-reality case, how it appears to the self versus how it really is," and (b) in the perspective-taking case, how it presently appears to self versus other. In contrast to young preschoolers, children of 6 to 7 years manage simple appearance-reality tasks with ease. However, they have great difficulty reflecting on and talking about such appearance-reality notions as "looks like," "really and truly, '" and especially, "looks different from the way it really and truly is. "' Finally, children of 11 to 12 years, and to an even greater degree college students, give evidence of possessing a substantial body of rich, readily available, and explicit knowledge in this area. Suppose someone shows a three-year-old and a six-yearold a red toy car covered by a green filter that makes the car look black, hands the car to the children to inspect, puts it behind the filter again, and asks, "What color is this car? Is it red or is it black?" (Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1985; cf. Braine & Shanks, 1965a, 1965b). The threeyear-old is likely to say "black," the six-year-old, "red." The questioner is also apt to get the same answers even if he or she first carefully explains and demonstrates the intended difference in meaning, for illusory displays, between "looks like to your eyes right now" and "really and truly is," and then asks what color it "'really and truly is." At issue in such simple tasks is the distinction between how things presently appear to the senses and how or what they really and enduringly are, that is, the familiar distinction between appearance and reality. The six-yearold is clearly in possession of some knowledge about this distinction and quickly senses what the task is about. The three-year-old, who is much less knowledgeable about the distinction, does not. For the past half-dozen years my co-workers and I have been using these and other methods to chart the developmental course of knowledge acquisition in this area. That is, we have been trying to find out what children of different ages do and do not know about the appearance-reality distinction and related phenomena. In this article I summarize what we have done and what we think we have learned (Flavell, Flavell, & Green, 1983; Flavell et al., 1985; Flavell, Zhang, Zou, Dong, & Qi, 1983; Taylor & Flavell, 1984). The summary is organized around the main questions that have guided our thinking and research in this area. Why Is This Development Important To Study? First, the distinction between appearance and reality is ecologically significant. It assumes many forms, arises in many situations, and can have serious consequences for our lives. The relation between appearance and reality figures importantly in everyday perceptual, conceptual, emotional, and social activity--in misperceptions, misexpectations, misunderstandings, false beliefs, deception, play, fantasy, and so forth. It is also a major preoccupation of philosophers, scientists, and other scholars; of artists, politicians, and other public performers; and of the thinking public that tries to evaluate what they say and do. It is, in sum, "the distinction which probably provides the intellectual basis for the fundamental epistemological construct common to science, 'folk' philosophy, religion, and myth, of a real world 'underlying' and 'explaining' the phenomenal one" (Braine & Shanks, 1965a, pp. 241-242). Second, the acquisition of at least some explicit knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction is probably a universal developmental outcome in our species. This knowledge seems so necessary to everyday intellectual and social life that one can hardly imagine a society in which normal people would not acquire it. To 418 April 1986 9 American Psychologist Copyright 1986 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/86/$00.75 Vol. 41, No. 4, 418-425 cite an example that has actually been researched, a number of investigators have been interested in the child's command of the distinction as a possible developmental prerequisite for, and perhaps even mediator of, Piagetian conservations (e.g., Braine & Shanks, 1965a, 1965b; Murray, 1968). Third, knowledge about the distinction seems to presuppose the explicit knowledge that human beings are sentient, cognizing subjects (cf. Chandler & Boyce, 1982; Selman, 1980) whose mental representations of objects and events can differ, both within the same person and between persons. In the within-person case, for example, I may be aware both that something appears to be A and that it really is B. I could also be aware that it might appear to be C under special viewing conditions, or that I pretended or fantasized that it was D yesterday. I may know that these are all possible ways that I can represent the very same thing (i.e., perceive it, encode it, know it, interpret it, construe it, or think about i t--although inadequate, the term "represent" will have to do). In the between-persons case, I may be aware that you might represent the same thing differently than I do, because our perceptual, conceptual, or affective perspectives on it might differ. If this analysis is correct, knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction is but one instance of our more general knowledge that the selfsame object or event can be represented (apprehended, experienced, etc.) in different ways by the same person and by different people. In this analysis, then, its development is worth studying because it is part of the larger development of our conscious knowledge about our own and other minds and, thus, of metacognition (e.g., Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, & Campione, 1983; Flavell, 1985; Wellman, 1985) and of social cognition (e.g., Flavell, 1985; Shantz, 1983). I will return to this line of reasoning in another section of the article. How Can Young Children's Knowledge About the Appearance-Reality Distinction Be Tested? The development of appearance-reality knowledge in preschool children has been investigated by Braine and Editor's note. This article is based on a Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award address presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Los Angeles, California, August 1985. Award addresses, submitted by award recipients, are published as received except for minor editorial changes designed to maintain American Psychologist format. This reflects a policy of recognizing distinguished award recipients by eliminating the usual editorial review process to provide a forum consistent with that employed in delivering the award address. Author's note. The work described in this article was supported by National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHO) Grant HD 09814. I am very grateful to my research collaborators, Eleanor Flavell and Frances Green, and to Carole Beat, Gary Bonitatibus, Susan Carey, Sophia Cohen, Rochel Gelman, Suzanne Lovett, Eleanor Maceoby, Ellen Markman, Bradford Pillow, Qian Man-jun, Marjorie Taylor, Zhang Xiao-dong, and other colleagues and students for their invaluable help with this research. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John H. Flavell, Department of Psychology, Jordan Hall, Building 420, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. Shanks (1965a, 1965b), Daehler (1970), DeVries (1969), Elkind (1966), King (1971), Langer and Strauss (1972), Murray (1965, 1968), Tronick and Hershenson (1979) and, most recently and systematically, by our research group. In most of our studies we have used variations of the following procedure to assess young children's ability to think about appearance and reality (Flavell, Flavell, & Green, 1983). First, we pretrain the children briefly on the meaning of the distinction and associated terminology by showing them (for example) a Charlie Brown puppet inside a ghost costume. We explain and demonstrate that Charlie Brown "'looks like a ghost to your eyes right now" but is "really and truly Charlie Brown," and that "sometimes things look like one thing to your eyes when they are really and truly something else." We then present a variety of illusory stimuli in a nondeceptive fashion and ask about their appearance and their reality. For instance, we first show the children a very realistic looking fake rock made out of a soft sponge-like material and then let them discover its identity by manipulating it. We next ask, in random order: (a) "What is this really and truly? Is it really and truly a sponge or is it really and truly a rock?" (b) "When you look at this with your eyes right now, does it look like a rock or does it look like a sponge?" Or we show the children a white stimulus, move it behind a blue filter, and similarly ask about its real and apparent color. (Of course its "real color" is now blue, but only people who know something about color perception realize this.) Similar procedures are used to assess sensitivity to the distinction between real and apparent size, shape, events, and object presence. How Do Young Children Perform on Simple Appearance-Reality Tasks? Our studies have consistently shown that threeto fouryear-old children pre