TV Guide: Learning to Use Video as a Source of Information

Abstract

68 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000.To gain information from a symbol, one must recognize the relation between the symbol and what it stands for. Although the relation between a live video image and a real, current event seems obvious to adults, this is not true of very young children: In a series of previous studies, 2-year-olds did not reliably use a video view of a hiding event to find a hidden object. Children's experience with television (which typically is not related to present reality) may predispose them to overlook relevant information presented by this medium. In the research reported here, the effect of experience on children's use of information from video was examined. In Experiments 1 and 2, 2-year-old children were exposed to live video at home over the course of two weeks. They were subsequently able to use video to solve an object-retrieval task in the lab. After gaining experience with live video, the children also successfully used information from a different symbolic medium, pictures, to solve a similar problem. This is the first evidence of transfer from one symbolic medium to another by this age group. The limits of transfer from live video experience were explored in Experiments 3A and 3B. In Experiment 4, two potentially helpful factors present in live video were examined. When contingency and auditory cues were added to 2-year-olds' experience with live video in the lab, they succeeded at the video object-retrieval task and a later picture transfer task. Thus, giving 2-year-olds relevant experience with video helped them detect the relation between video and reality. Age differences in young children's use of video suggest that symbolic experience and cognitive flexibility are involved in symbolic development.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD