Do young children think of television images as pictures or real objects

Three studies investigated whether 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds interpret television images as mere pictorial representations of objects or as real, physically‐present objects. Four‐year‐olds gave clear evidence of making the former interpretation whereas 3‐year‐olds seemed to make the latter one. However, the data suggest that the younger children's errors reflect a failure to differentiate conceptually between television images and their referent objects rather than a conviction that real objects populate television sets.

[1]  D. Zaitchik,et al.  When representations conflict with reality: The preschooler's problem with false beliefs and “false” photographs , 1990, Cognition.

[2]  J. Deloache.  Young children's understanding of the correspondence between a scale model and a larger space , 1989 .

[3]  J. Condry,et al.  Discriminating Real from Make-Believe on Television: A Developmental Study. , 1989 .

[4]  J. Deloache.  Rapid change in the symbolic functioning of very young children. , 1987, Science.

[5]  J. Flavell.  The development of children's knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction. , 1986, The American psychologist.

[6]  H. Wimmer,et al.  Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception , 1983, Cognition.

[7]  H. Beilin,et al.  Children's belief in photographic fidelity. , 1981 .

[8]  P. Morison.  Reasoning about the Realities on Television: A Developmental Study. Technical Report No. 18. , 1980 .

[9]  Frederick Williams,et al.  Use of commercial television in parent and child interaction , 1979 .

[10]  R. Hawkins.  The Dimensional Structure of Children’s Perceptions of Television Reality , 1977 .

[11]  E. Markman.  Children's Difficulty with Word-Referent Differentiation , 1976 .

[12]  J. Piaget,et al.  The Child's Conception of the World , 1971 .

[13]  J. Flavell.  The Developmental psychology of Jean Piaget , 1963 .

[14]  John H. Flavell,et al.  Developmental changes in young children's knowledge about the mind , 1990 .

[15]  H. Wellman.  Children''s theories of mind , 1990 .

[16]  P. Harris.  Children and emotion , 1989 .

[17]  E. Markman.  Categorization and naming in children , 1989 .

[18]  D. Olson,et al.  Developing theories of mind , 1988 .

[19]  John H. Flavell,et al.  The development of children's knowledge about the mind: From cognitive connections to mental representations. , 1988 .

[20]  J. Flavell,et al.  Development of knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction. , 1986, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[21]  E. Gibson,et al.  The development of perception , 1983 .

[22]  Jennings Bryant,et al.  Children's Understanding of Television: Research on Attention and Comprehension , 1983 .

[23]  Michael Lewis,et al.  Social cognition and the acquisition of self , 1979 .

[24]  J. Flavell,et al.  The development of knowledge about visual perception. , 1977, Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation.