The Development of Representation in Search: A Social-Cognitive Analysis

Abstract

BERTENTHAL, BENNETT I., and FISCHER, KURT W. The Development of Representation in Search: A Social-Cognitive Analysis. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1983, 54, 846-857. Problems in replicating in Piaget's invisible-displacements task point the way toward a social reconceptualization of the search situation: With the emergence of representation at age 2, children can understand that the experimenter is an independent agent who hides the object surreptitiously. Contrary to Piaget, however, 2-year-olds can only base their search on some single, surreptitious hiding act of the experimenter, not on the entire path of invisible displacements of the object. In 4 experiments with 12to 24-month-olds, children did not recreate the path of the object; but by 24 months they did seem to treat the experimenter as an independent hider. When 24-month-olds saw the experimenter hide the object by moving his hand from end to end behind or under a row of screens, they consistently began their search in an end screen. The search of infants under 18 months was not affected in the same way by watching the experimenter. Infants over 18 but less than 24 months seemed to show the advanced search pattern only when they had extensive experience with the search situation. The older infants' end-screen search in combination with other search strategies independent of representation can produce an illusion of systematic search recreating the object's path.