Forgetting and symbolic insight: Delay improves children's use of a novel symbol.

To use a symbol, children must understand that the symbol stands for something in the world. This development has often been investigated in the model-room task in which children use a scale model to try to find a toy that is hidden in the room that the model represents. To succeed, children must acquire dual representation; they must put aside their understanding of the model as an object and focus more on what the model represents. Here we suggested that forgetting irrelevant details or misleading information may be an important part of acquiring and maintaining dual representation. Based on prior research showing that forgetting can promote insight in children and adults and that a small sample of 3-year-olds could improve on the model-room task with a delay, we hypothesized that taking a break during the model-room task would facilitate forgetting and hence symbolic insight. A total of 88 3-year-olds performed 8 trials of the model-room task. Half of the children received a 24-h delay after Trial 4, and half performed the 8 trials consecutively. Children who received a 24-h delay had better symbolic performance on the last 4 trials compared with children whose testing sessions occurred consecutively on 1 day, even when statistically controlling for the effects of learning over trials and memory on children's performance. This study provides strong initial evidence that a delay can promote symbolic insight in 3-year-old children.

Children's Learning from Touch Screens: A Dual Representation Perspective.

Parents and educators often expect that children will learn from touch screen devices, such as during joint e-book reading. Therefore an essential question is whether young children understand that the touch screen can be a symbolic medium - that entities represented on the touch screen can refer to entities in the real world. Research on symbolic development suggests that symbolic understanding requires that children develop dual representational abilities, meaning children need to appreciate that a symbol is an object in itself (i.e., picture of a dog) while also being a representation of something else (i.e., the real dog). Drawing on classic research on symbols and new research on children's learning from touch screens, we offer the perspective that children's ability to learn from the touch screen as a symbolic medium depends on the effect of interactivity on children's developing dual representational abilities. Although previous research on dual representation suggests the interactive nature of the touch screen might make it difficult for young children to use as a symbolic medium, the unique interactive affordances may help alleviate this difficulty. More research needs to investigate how the interactivity of the touch screen affects children's ability to connect the symbols on the screen to the real world. Given the interactive nature of the touch screen, researchers and educators should consider both the affordances of the touch screen as well as young children's cognitive abilities when assessing whether young children can learn from it as a symbolic medium.

Measuring preschoolers' superstitious tendencies.

Superstitious behaviors have been studied extensively in adults and non-human species, but have not been systematically assessed in children. The purpose of the study is to develop and validate a method of measuring superstitious tendencies in young children based on an established learning paradigm. In two studies, 3-5-year-olds tapped a computer to make a target image appear. On half the trials, a sensory stimulus appeared at a random time before the target. Superstitious tendencies were measured by change in tapping during the presence of the sensory stimulus. Children's proportion of tapping increased during the presence of the sensory stimulus, indicating that children associated the sensory stimulus with the appearance of the target image, even though the two stimuli were not causally related. Implications for the development of superstitious tendencies and children's causal knowledge are discussed.