Resumen

SALSA, Analía M.  y  VIVALDI, Romina A.. From object to symbol: Cognitive and social aspects of children's knowledge of pictures. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2012, vol.29, n.1, pp.133-149. ISSN 1668-7027.

From early in infancy, children are exposed to a wide variety of figurative representations; they read picture books and magazines with their parents and look at family photos and images on television and video. Figurative representations are a particular type of external representations. An external representation is "something that someone intends to stand for or represent something other than itself" (DeLoache, 1995, p. 109). Figurative representations are two-dimensional representations highly similar to their referents; however, this article develops the idea that even though this perceptual similarity, figurative representations are not transparent objects for very young children. Understanding the dual nature of pictures, that they are things in themselves and communicate meaning by referring to some other reality, is a lengthy and complex developmental process influenced and determined by perceptual, cognitive and social-cognitive mechanisms. The first part of the article reviews studies that have identified the major milestones in pictorial comprehension and discusses the perceptual (discrimination, categorization) and cognitive mechanisms (concept formation, analogical reasoning, representational strategies) underlying this process.This analysis allows us to propose three phases of development from birth to the beginning of the school period: (1) apre-symbolic phase, between 0 and 18 months of age, when infants mainly take a manipulative stance toward pictures; (2) a symbolic phase, between two and three years, when children comprehend and use the symbolic link between pictures and referents; and (3) a post-symbolic phase, after four years, when children understand that the contents of pictures remain stable despite any change made to the real objects they depict. The second part of the article examines the influence of social factors on pictorial comprehension, specifically symbolic experience and the intention of the creator and/or user of a picture. The supporting role of social factors in symbolic development has long been demonstrated in the domain of language (see Baldwin, 2000; Tomasello, 1999, 2003); in contrast, very little is known about the impact of social cognitive mechanisms (cultural learning, intentionality) in children's knowledge of pictures. DeLoache (1995, 2002) proposed that with age children gain experience with symbols and develop a general expectation or readiness to look for and detect symbolic relations among entities. However, this paper presents evidence that symbolic experience has a crucial social dimension; supportive contexts that highlight the relation between pictorial symbols and their referents in close social interactions facilitate children's comprehension of images (Callaghan & Rankin, 2002; Szechter & Liben, 2004). Cross-cultural and social differences in the age of onset of symbolic comprehension also support this hypothesis (Callaghan et al., 2011; Salsa, in press). Intention is both necessary and sufficient to establish a symbolic relation (Werner & Kaplan, 1963); understanding intentionality is especially important for interpreting symbols because their meaning is assigned by the symbol creator or user. There is abundant evidence that young infants (12 months) are sensitive to basic aspects of the intentions of adults who act on objects in the world, and that older infants (18-24 months) begin to discern the more subtle communicative intentions of adults found in the flow of actions found in social exchanges using language symbols (Tomasello, 2003). A few studies have explored whether children are sensitive to another person's intention to represent when they name drawings or use photographs in a search task (Bloom & Markson, 1998; Gelman & Ebeling, 1998; Preissler & Bloom, 2008; Salsa & Peralta, 2007). Nevertheless, these studies show that children's ability to read intentions is another privileged route towards symbolic understanding.

Palabras clave : Figurativere presentations; Comprehension; Dual representation; Symbolic experience; Intentionality.

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