Here’s an interesting article from Scientific American which discusses how young children start to develop an understanding of symbolism, starting with a memory experiment that turned out not to examine memory at all. See also Metafilter discussion here.
3 responses to “The little chair is not for sitting on.”
I remember that when my youngest sister was little, she would try to put her foot in a toy shoe keychain!
That’s a great article. Thanks for linking to it.
Reminds me of the famous pre-scientific (don’t ask for dates) unintentional cogsci experiments with a young boy aged eight who was blind from birth. Cataracts, I think. Anyway – some super-primitive Lasik surgery was conducted on that kid, and – lo and behold – he could see! Well, during the child’s recovery process, the doctors found that he could not make *any* sense of paintings, and could not correlate obvious two-dimensional symbols in paintings to real-world items – even simple geometrical shapes. It took the kid years to develop this skill, just as if he was a toddler. That child’s name: Norman Rockwell.
J/K !