Children's understanding of the knowledge prerequisites of drawing and pretending.

Full Abstract

Many young children will claim that someone is pretending to be something even when the person does not know what that something is. To examine whether children's failure to take knowledge prerequisites into account is part of a more fundamental problem in recognizing how mental representations constrain external ones, the authors asked children whether an artist who did not know what something was, yet whose drawing bore resemblance to it, was drawing it. The same questions were asked regarding pretending. Children performed similarly on pretending and drawing questions, and performance on both questions improved when the protagonists' point of view was emphasized. Performance for drawing improved somewhat when alternative goals were stated. Further, cross-sectional data indicated that understanding how knowledge relates to producing external representations increases gradually from age 4 to age 8, suggesting that experiential factors may be crucial to this understanding.

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Author information

Author/s: Richert, Rebekah A (RA); Lillard, Angeline S (AS);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville 22904-4400, USA. rar8z(-atsign-)virginia.edu

Grants: 5T32MH18242-15 (Agency:United States NIMH)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

Journal: Developmental psychology (Dev Psychol), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-Nov; vol 38 (issue 6) : pp 1004-15

Dates: Created 2002/11/13; Completed 2003/04/07; Revised 2007/11/14;

PMID: 12428711, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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