Becoming symbol-minded

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2003.12.004Get rights and content

Abstract

No facet of human development is more crucial than becoming symbol-minded. To participate fully in any society, children have to master the symbol systems that are important in that society. Children today must learn to use more varieties of symbolic media than ever before, so it is even more important to understand the processes involved in symbolic development. Recent research has greatly expanded what we know about early symbol use. We have learned, for example, that infants initially accept a wide range of entities as potential symbols and that young children are often confused about the nature of symbol–referent relations. During the first few years of life, however, children make rapid progress towards becoming competent symbol users.

Section snippets

Defining characteristics of symbols

I find it most useful to think of symbols very broadly: to offer a working definition, a symbol is something that someone intends to represent something other than itself [2]. Every component of this definition is essential.

Symbols and human development

The component ‘someone’ points to humans as ‘the symbolic species’ [3]. Although remarkable success has been achieved teaching non-human primates and some other animals to use certain symbols 4, 5, 6, the creative and flexible use of a vast array of different types of symbols is unique to humans. The emergence in evolution of the symbolic capacity irrevocably transformed our species 3, 7, vastly expanding our intellectual horizons and making possible the cultural transmission of knowledge to

Symbols represent things

Symbols ‘represent’; they refer to, they denote, they are about something. They are not merely associated with their referents. In the study of early symbolic development, it is often difficult to be sure whether a young child's use or understanding of words or other entities is truly symbolic. Consider a young child who looks at a picture of a dog and says ‘dog’. He or she could very well understand that both the word and the picture represent a general class of entities in the world.

Symbols are general

The very indefinite term ‘something’ is quite deliberately used twice in the above definition to emphasize that virtually anything can be used to represent virtually anything else: spoken words, printed words, pictures, video images, numbers, graphs, a block of wood, a chair in a store window, maps, and an infinite list of other possibilities can be exploited to stand for something that someone wants to symbolize.

There is substantial evidence that young children start the process of acquiring

Symbols are intentional

Human ‘intention’ is at the heart of symbolization, both in the philosophical sense of being about something and in the everyday, psychological sense of being intended by someone, of being done for a purpose. A person's intention that one entity represent another is both necessary and sufficient to establish a symbolic relation. Nothing is inherently a symbol; only as a result of someone using it with the goal of denoting or referring does it take on a symbolic role.

Infants and toddlers are

Learning symbol–referent relations

One might think that it goes without saying that a symbol always represents something ‘other than itself’, but only gradually do infants appreciate how some symbols differ from their referents. They have to figure out through experience that a depicted toy cannot be picked up and milk cannot be obtained from a photograph of a cup.

When presented with books containing highly realistic photographs of individual objects, 9-month-olds do not simply look at the pictures, as an older person would 29,

Very young children's use of symbolic artifacts as information

As mentioned earlier, a vital function of symbols is to enable humans to acquire information without direct experience. Our vast stores of cultural knowledge exist only because we can learn indirectly through symbolic representations.

Research that my colleagues and I have done has revealed many factors influencing very young children's ability to exploit the informational potential of symbolic artifacts. In this research, very young children are provided with information about the location of a

Dual representation

The age difference in this task is attributed to the difficulty young children have achieving ‘dual representation’ (see Box 2). The younger the children, the more inclined they are to focus on the concrete object itself rather than its relation to what it represents. Several highly counterintuitive results provide strong support for the dual representation hypothesis. For example, it has been shown that decreasing the salience of a model as an object by placing it behind a window enables

Conclusion

The youngest members of the symbolic species rapidly master many different types of symbols. Their progress is initially aided by their acceptance of a wide variety of entities as representations and by their sensitivity to the intentions of other people. Important milestones of symbolic development that are achieved in the first few years of life include figuring out the nature of the relation between symbolic objects and their referents and using those relations to acquire information. What

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