The Effect Of The Spatial Relational Similarity On Children's Symbol Representation

The competence of symbolic representations is unique to human and one important facet of children's cognitive development. Many researches use the symbolic object-retrieval task to identify several factors that affect young children's ability to understand and use symbol.The two studies reported here confirm that above 3 years old children have had a certain degree of symbolic representations. They basically perform successfully the symbolic object-retrieval task according to the symbol-referent relation, that is, solve the problem using the symbol-mediated information. But young children's competence is instable; the performance of young children's symbolic-mediated retrieval descends when manipulating the spatial relational similarity.Experiment 1 detects that the memorial performances of the tow groups have no differences, but the symbolical performances of unique places are better than it of identical places. Young children have the limit of discernment on the similarity of spatial relation. When the hiding place is one of two identical places, the children need to take the similarity of spatial relationships into account to correct place, so they almost fail.Experiment 2 modifies conditions and explores the reason of error. When superficial similarity is dominant, young children analogize more easily on superficial similarity, ignoring the spatial relational similarity. When the superficial similarity is more prominent, the deeper, abstract similarity is more easily concealed.The results across two studies reveal that multiple factors interact to determine the children's symbolic representation.