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For the project, I had built a small-scale model of a room thatwas part of my lab. The real space was furnished like a standard living room,with an upholstered couch, an armchair, a cabinet, and so on. The miniatureitems were as similar as possible: they were the same shape and material,covered with the same fabric and arranged in the same positions. For the study,a child watched as we hid a miniature toy--a plastic dog we dubbed "LittleSnoopy"--in the model, which we referred to as "Little Snoopy'sroom." We then encouraged the child to find "Big Snoopy," alarge version of the toy "hiding in the same place in his big room."We wondered whether children could use their memory to figure out where to findthe toy in the large room. Thethree-year-olds were very successful. After they observed the small toy beingplaced behind the miniature couch, they ran into the real room and found thelarge toy behind the real couch. But the two-and-a-half-year-olds, much to myand their parents surprise, failed abysmally. They cheerfully ran into the bigroom, but most of them had no idea where to look, even though they rememberedwhere the tiny toy was hidden in the miniature room and could readily find itthere. Their failure to use whatthey knew about the model to draw an inference about the room indicated thatthey did not appreciate the relation between the model and room. I soonrealized that my memory study was instead a study of symbolic understanding andthat the younger children's failure might be telling us something interestingabout how and when youngsters acquire the ability to understand that one objectcan stand for another. The confusion seems to beconceptual, not perceptual. Infants can perfectly well perceive the differencebetween objects and pictures. Given a choice between the two, infants choosethe real thing. But they do not yet fully understand what pictures are and howthey differ from the things depicted (the "referents"), and so theyexplore: some actually lean over and put their lips on the nipple in aphotograph of a bottle, for instance. If a child believes that amachine has shrunk an object or a room, then in the child's mind the miniatureis the thing itself. There is no symbolic relation between room and model, sochildren should be able to apply what they know about the big version to thelittle one.
We used the powers of ourdevice to shrink toys and a large tent. In front of the child, we placed atoy--a troll doll with vivid purple hair--in a tent and aimed the shrinkingmachine at the tent. The child and experimenter then decamped to another roomto wait while the machine did its work. When they returned to the lab, a smalltent sat where the big one had been.
When we asked the children tosearch for the toy, they immediately looked in the small tent. Believing theminiature to actually be the original tent after shrinking, they successfullyretrieved the hidden toy. Unlike in our scale model experiment, they had nodual representation to master: the small tent was the same as the large tent,and thus the toy was where it should be, according to the toddlers view of theworld.
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发表于 2018-9-2 09:50:18
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