Biomedical subjects

J H Flavell

Publications and source records attributed to J H Flavell.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1978

Young children's knowledge about visual perception: hiding objects from others.

Children of ages 2 1/2, 3, and 3 1/2 years were tested for their understanding of object hiding, believed to reflect an early developmental level of knowledge about visual perception. Even the youngest subjects could nonegocentrically hide an object by placing it on the opposite side of a screen from another person, even though placing it there necessarily left it unhidden from themselves. In contrast, there was a significant increase with age in the ability to achieve the same physical end state by placing the screen between the other person and the object. Most subjects at each age level correctly indicated that the other person could see the object when the experimenter interposed the screen between the child and the object but that the other person could not see the object when she placed the screen between the other person and the object. These and other recent findings indicate that children of this age can be both nonegocentric and skillful at estimating what other people do and do not see under various viewing conditions.

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PubMed1977

The development of knowledge about visual perception.

This chapter describes recent theory and research in one limited area of social-cognitive development, namely, the childhood acquisition of knowledge about visual perception. The author and his co-workers have hypothesized that there are two developmental levels of such knowledge. At earlier-developing Level 1, the child understands that others as well as the self see objects, and is also able to infer correctly what objects they do or do not currently see if provided with adequate cues. At later-developing Level 2, the child understands not only that people can see objects, but also that they can have differing visual experiences while seeing the same object; most notably, they can have different spatial perspectival views of it when looking at it from different positions. Arguments and evidence for the developmental distinction between Level 1 and Level 2 knowledge are briefly presented in Section I. A more detailed model of Level 1 knowledge is presented in Section II, together with an account of several studies of its development during the first four years of life. During these early years, children appear to learn a great deal about how to produce visual percepts in others (showing and pointing to things), how to deprive others of percepts (hide objects), and how to diagnose the percepts they currently have (follow others' direction of gaze and pointing gestures). Section III similarly reviews recent theory and research on the development of Level 2 perspective-taking knowledge in older children. This work is focused mainly on the acquisition and use of very general perspective-taking rules, such as the rule that two observers who look at an object array from the same spatial position must on that account necessarily have identical perspectival views of the array. Section IV described further developmental research that could be or is being done on Level 2 knowledge, Level 1 knowledge, and on the Level 1-Level 2 distinction.

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PubMed1977

The development in very young children of tacit knowledge concerning visual perception.

The purpose of this study of early social-cognitive development was to assess the very young child's behaviorally expressed knowledge of people's visual-attentional acts and abilities. Boys and girls (N = 60) 1, 1 1/2, 2, 2 1/2, and 3 years of age were tested in their homes with their mother's help. Three sorts of tasks were used: 1. Percept production. The child's task was to produce a visual percept in the other. Examples include pointing to objects ("productive pointing") and a wide variety of object-showing problems. 2. Percept deprivation. The opposite, exemplified by a variety of object-hiding problems. 3. Percept diagnosis. The child's task was to determine what the other was already visually attending to, either by looking where his or her finger was pointed ("receptive pointing") or where his eyes were directed. It was found that the majority of 1-year-olds produced and comprehended pointing, and would sometimes hold out a toy to show it, but did little else. The 3-year-olds were at ceiling on virtually all tasks. At 1 1/2 years, children usually showed a picture by holding it flat so that both they and the other could see it. Jrom 2 on, they usually turned it toward the other in the adult fashion. Very few children of any age showed egocentrically--i.e., orienting the picture so only they could see it. By age 2, the children solved what were presumably novel showing problems for them: e.g., successfully showing to another a picture pasted on the inside bottom of a hollow cube. Hiding ability emerged later than showing ability but seemed well established by age 3. The role of the other's eyes in seeing appeared to be quite well understood at least by age 2-2 1/2. As examples, children of this age took the other's hands away from her or his eyes before trying to show her something, and could usually tell where she was looking from her eye orientation alone. These age trends presumably reflect important developments in the area of social interaction and communication, as well as with respect to cognition about percepts.

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