Early understanding of the representational function of pictures

An important function of pictures is the communication of information — a function that has been ignored in research on the development of pictorial perception and comprehension. When are young children first capable of using pictures as a source of information to guide their behavior? The six studies reported here reveal a dramatic developmental change between 24 and 30 months of age in the use of pictorial information about the location of a hidden object. When presented with a picture that showed the location of a hidden toy, 30-month-olds readily retrieved the toy, but 24-month-olds did not. The extremely poor performance of the 24-month-olds was replicated and shown to persist in spite of various modifications made in the task in an effort to improve performance. We conclude that our 24-month-old subjects did not interpret the pictures as representation of current reality. We propose that very young children's early pictorial experience may predispose them to be overly conservative in interpreting the relation between pictures and their referents.