Blades M, Cooke Z
Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.
J Genet Psychol. 1994 Jun;155(2):201-18. doi: 10.1080/00221325.1994.9914772.
Children's ability to understand that a real environment can be represented in a symbolic form (i.e., by a model) is an important developmental achievement. Researchers have claimed that children who are just 3 years of age appreciate models as representations. This research was based on tasks that involved having young children use a model to locate a hiding place in an actual room. In this article, however, we point out the difficulties in interpreting previous model tasks, and we describe two studies that showed that young 3-year-olds could perform model tasks successfully when the hiding place they were looking for was a unique place in the model (and room). When the hiding place was unique, the children had to note only that place and they needed no further knowledge about the relationship between the model and the room. When the hiding place was one of two identical places, however, the children needed to take spatial relationships into account to distinguish the correct place, and young 3-year-olds were unable to do this. Four-year-olds were able to use spatial relationships to distinguish identical places when the model was aligned with the space it represented, but they had difficulty when the model was not aligned. Five-year-olds could use spatial relationships effectively between one model space and another whether or not the model was aligned.
儿童理解真实环境可以用符号形式（即通过模型）来表示的能力是一项重要的发展成就。研究人员声称，年仅3岁的儿童就能将模型视为一种表征。这项研究基于一些任务，这些任务要求幼儿使用模型在实际房间中找到一个隐藏地点。然而，在本文中，我们指出了以往模型任务解释中的困难，并描述了两项研究，这两项研究表明，当3岁幼儿寻找的隐藏地点在模型（和房间）中是一个独特的位置时，他们能够成功完成模型任务。当隐藏地点是独特的时，儿童只需注意那个位置，而无需进一步了解模型与房间之间的关系。然而，当隐藏地点是两个相同位置之一时，儿童需要考虑空间关系来区分正确的位置，而3岁的幼儿无法做到这一点。当模型与它所代表的空间对齐时，4岁的儿童能够利用空间关系来区分相同的位置，但当模型未对齐时，他们就会遇到困难。无论模型是否对齐，5岁的儿童都能有效地利用一个模型空间与另一个模型空间之间的空间关系。
