Young
Children's Understanding of Mental Representation: Pretend and
Dream
T. Kinoshita |
The
purpose of this study was to investigate the preschoolers' understanding
of the nature of mental representation. Twenty-one 5-year-olds and
15 6-year-olds were told two types of stories describing mental states
(pretend and dream) and asked several questions. The results presented
the two levels of their understanding. (1) Level 1: children could
understand the ontological difference between mental representation
and physical object. But they judged that mental representation could
never be believed as true. (2) Level 2: in addition to the level
1 understanding, they could draw a epistemological distinction. They
could understand the different representational relations between
representation and its referent. This understanding was hardly shown
before 6 years.
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