Very Young Children's Cognitive Characteristics Of Video Information And Its Educational Implications

With the popularity of television, nowadays children are born in a new environment with TV set. The information conveyed by TV has exerted a subtle influence on them. We should focus on how to develop TV programs that are appropriate to very young children in order to meet the early child's needs of media and promote early child development. This study was designed to investigate the very young children's cognitive characteristics of video information by experiments. We tried to find out how early children understand video information and how the change of video information's characteristics influenced very young children's attention to video. Our purpose is to provide educational suggestions to child TV programs producers and parents to produce or choose TV programs that are appropriate to very young children.This study was explored through two aspects. In study 1,we investigated the developmental characteristics of 2～3-year-old children's understanding of video, which focused on whether the children can use video information to resolve problems based on information gained from video and how children's cognition of video information develops. The experiment used a version of the search paradigm developed by Schmitt &Anderson ( 2002 ) , in which children retrieve a toy hidden in a familiar adjacent room. 72 subjects (23 2-year-old children, 26 2.5-year-old, 23 3-year-old children) were randomly drawn out. Then we used a version of the search paradigm developed by Deloache(1987)to validate the results of the experiment.In study 2, we investigate video information's salience and complexity influencing on 2.5～4-year-old children's attention to video. We produce a set of computer procedure by Visual Basic 6.0. 60 subjects (20 2-year-old children, 20 2.5-year-old, 20 3-year-old children) were randomly drawn out to find out the hidden target during experiments. We supposed whether the children could find out the target correctly depended on their effective attention to the video.The results showed:1) The need for dual representation presented a substantial challenge to young children's understanding the connection between a video image and reality.2) Children come to realize that a symbolic medium (in this case television) can represent something other than itself, explaining the increase in performance with age. The ability of dual representation is undeveloped near 2 years old. But it shows a great development near 3 years old.3) The ability of dual representation indicated a rapid developmental change between 2.5 and 3 years of age.4) With substantial repetition, difficulty with the video toy retrieval problem experienced by 2-year-olds could be reduced. 2-year-olds' ability of dual representation could be made up.5) Video information's salience and complexity influenced on 2.5～4-year-old children's attention to video.6) Reducing salience of video information or increasing complexity of it had greater influence on 2.5 and 3-year-old children than that on 4-year-old children.Based on these results, several educational implications were proposed on three aspects about function orientation, audience orientation and producing principle of very young child TV program.