Rapid Change in the Symbolic Functioning of Very Young Children
- 11 December 1987
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Science
- Vol. 238 (4833) , 1556-1557
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.2446392
Abstract
A remarkable difference in the understanding of the symbolic relation between a scale model and the larger space that it represented was displayed by two age groups of young children. Three-year-old children who observed an object being hidden in a model knew where to find an analogous object hidden in the corresponding location in a room, but 2.5-year-old children did not. The success of the group of older children reveals an advance in their cognitive flexibility: they think of a model in two ways at the same time--both as the thing itself and as a symbol for something else.This publication has 8 references indexed in Scilit:
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