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. What could be more fascinating, I concluded, than finding out how young children begin to use and understand symbolic objects and how they come to master some of the symbolic items ubiquitous in modern life. As a result of that fortuitous model-room experiment, I shifted my focus from memory to symbolic thinking.
Pictures Come to Life
The first type of symbolic object infants and young children master is pictures. No symbols seem simpler to adults, but my colleagues and I have discovered that infants initially find pictures perplexing. The problem stems from the duality inherent in all symbolic objects: they are real in and of themselves and, at the same time, representations of something else. To understand them, the viewer must achieve dual representation: he or she must mentally represent the object as well as the relation between it and what it stands for.
A few years ago I became intrigued by anecdotes suggesting that infants do not appreciate the dual nature of pictures. Every now and then, I would hear of a baby who tried to pick up a depicted apple or to fit a foot into a photograph of a shoe. My colleagues--David H. Uttal of Northwestern University, Sophia L. Pierroutsakos of St. Louis Community College and Karl S. Rosengren of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign--and I decided to investigate even though we assumed such behaviors would be rare and therefore difficult to study. Fortunately, we were wrong.
