Symbol-Brained

[Ghetta Life]

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000ACE3F-007E-12DC-807E83414B7F0000

About 20 years ago I had one of those wonderful moments when research takes 
an unexpected but fruitful turn. I had been studying toddler memory and was 
beginning a new experiment with two-and-a-half- and three-year-olds. For the 
project, I had built a model of a room that was part of my lab. The real 
space was furnished like a standard living room, albeit a rather shabby one, 
with an upholstered couch, an armchair, a cabinet and so on. The miniature 
items were as similar as possible to their larger counterparts: 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 "Little Snoopy"--in the model, which we 
referred to as "Little Snoopy's room." We then encouraged the child to find 
"Big Snoopy," a large version of the toy "hiding in the same place in his 
big room." We wondered whether children could use their memory of the small 
room to figure out where to find the toy in the large one.

The three-year-olds were, as we had expected, very successful. After they 
observed the small toy being placed behind the miniature couch, they ran 
into the room and found the large toy behind the real couch. But the 
two-and-a-half-year-olds, much to my and their parents' surprise, failed 
abysmally. They cheerfully ran into the room to retrieve the large toy, but 
most of them had no idea where to look, even though they remembered where 
the tiny toy was hidden in the miniature room and could readily find it 
there.

Their failure to use what they knew about the model to draw an inference 
about the room indicated that they did not appreciate the relation between 
the model and room. I soon realized that my memory study was instead a study 
of symbolic understanding and that the younger children's failure might be 
telling us something interesting about how and when youngsters acquire the 
ability to understand that one object can stand for another.

What most distinguishes humans from other creatures is our ability to create 
and manipulate a wide variety of symbolic representations. This capacity 
enables us to transmit information from one generation to another, making 
culture possible, and to learn vast amounts without having direct 
experience--we all know about dinosaurs despite never having met one. 
Because of the fundamental role of symbolization in almost everything we do, 
perhaps no aspect of human development is more important than becoming 
symbol-minded.

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