Can children be trained in making the distinction between appearance and reality?

Abstract

Recent research on the appearance-reality distinction indicates that preschool children often have difficulty reporting that an object can have an appearance that is discrepant from what the children know to be true about the object. This problem could be due to a general difficulty that young children have in representing the same object or event in more than one way. Alternatively, children may have difficulty understanding what is being asked in appearance-reality studies. This research examined the latter possibility by comparing children's performance on appearance-reality tasks before and after they played a game designed to help them understand the terms “looks like” and “really and truly” which are used to ask children about objects with misleading appearances. In a second experiment, the performance of children in a training condition was compared with the performance of children who received no training. The results of both experiments showed that although children were able to do the training game and were intrigued by the misleading appearances in the game, their performance on the subsequent appearance-reality tasks was not better than their pretest performance (Experiment 1), and was not better than the performance of children in a control group (Experiment 2). These results suggest that children's difficulty with the distinction between appearance and reality is not due to an easily remedied misunderstanding about what is being asked.