Deák Gedeon O
Department of Cognitive Science, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2006 Dec;10(12):546-50. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2006.09.012. Epub 2006 Oct 31.
Our understanding of many mental, social and physical phenomena hinges on a general understanding that appearances can differ from reality. Yet young children sometimes seem unable to understand appearance-reality dissociations. In a standard test, children are shown a deceptive object and asked what it really is and what it looks like. Many preschool children give the same answer to both questions. This error has been attributed to children's inflexible conceptual representations or inflexibility in representing their own changing beliefs. However, evidence fails to support either hypothesis: new tests show that young children generally understand appearance-reality discrepancies as well as fantasy-reality distinctions. These tests instead implicate children's failure to understand the unfamiliar discourse format of the standard test. This misunderstanding might reveal a subtler difficulty in making logical inferences about questions.
我们对许多心理、社会和身体现象的理解取决于一个普遍的认识，即表象可能与现实不同。然而，幼儿有时似乎无法理解表象与现实的分离。在一个标准测试中，向孩子们展示一个具有欺骗性的物体，并问他们它实际上是什么以及它看起来像什么。许多学龄前儿童对这两个问题给出相同的答案。这个错误被归因于儿童僵化的概念表征或在表征自己不断变化的信念时的僵化。然而，证据并不支持这两种假设：新的测试表明，幼儿通常能理解表象与现实的差异以及幻想与现实的区别。这些测试反而表明儿童未能理解标准测试中不熟悉的话语形式。这种误解可能揭示了在对问题进行逻辑推理时存在的一个更微妙的困难。
