Developmental Factors Influencing Children's Learning from Picture Books

From: The Role of Book Features in Young Children's Transfer of Information from Picture Books to Real-World Contexts - by Gabrielle A. Strouse, Angela Nyhout and Patricia A. Ganea.

We want to share this research report with our parents for understanding the challenges their children might face while reading picture books.

Developmental Factors Influencing Children's Learning from Picture Books

Children's ability to transfer knowledge from picture books to the real world may be constrained by developments in their symbolic understanding, analogical reasoning, and their understanding of fantasy and reality.

One particular challenge that children may face when learning and applying real-world information from picture books is that of symbolic insight (DeLoache, 1991). That is, children need to be able to think flexibly about books as entities in themselves as well as symbolic sources of information about the world. For example, when reading an informational book about new animals such as South American cavies, children need to realize that they are reading a book with pages that can be flipped and pictures that tell a story about 2-dimensional cavies. They also need to recognize that the cavies on the page are intended to be representative of animals in the real world that have the same name (“cavies”) and features. Understanding that a picture in a book is an object that represents another entity is a symbolic task. This may not be a straightforward task for children especially since pictures in children's book can vary on the nature of their relation to the referent, that is, whether the picture represents real concrete (e.g., a cat) and abstract (e.g., letters and numbers) entities or imaginary entities (e.g., talking cats, talking pots, unicorns; Ganea and Canfield, 2015). Beyond the basic understanding that pictures are symbolic and stand for their referents, children will have to figure out what the nature of the referent is.

Young children often struggle with tasks that require symbolic reasoning. For example, 2-year-olds struggle to use information from videos and pictures of a room to help them find an object hidden in the real version of the room (Troseth and DeLoache, 1998). Despite the fact that these toddlers can easily point out and label the corresponding objects in the pictures and in the room, they do not transfer information from one to the other. Presumably this is because they think of the picture and the room each as a separate entity, and do not make the connection that the hidden object in the picture also represents a life-sized object hiding behind a pillow in the life-sized room. In addition, pictures in books are “impoverished” compared to information presented in real life because they provide only one visual perspective, lack depth cues like motion parallax and changing shadows, and may be low resolution. Simcock and DeLoache (2006) assert that perceptual differences between images in picture books and objects in the real world present a barrier to children's ability to use picture books symbolically, as a source of information about the world. This problem is not specific to young children's use of information from picture books, but from other symbolic media as well, such as videos (Anderson and Pempek, 2005; Barr, 2013). There is some evidence that transfer difficulties are similar across different media (books vs. videos; Brito et al., 2012), although there is also evidence of medium-specific differences in transfer (books vs. touchscreens; Strouse and Ganea, 2017). For the remainder of this review we will focus specifically on factors influencing young children's transfer from picture books.

Various features of picture books may differentially affect children's ability to treat the information symbolically. For example, pictures that more clearly represent the objects they depict may support children in recognizing the link between book depictions and the real world (Ganea et al., 2008; Ganea and Canfield, 2015). As such, unrealistic portrayals such as cartoonish images, fantastical settings, and depictions of animals with human characteristics may present particular challenges for children and will be reviewed below. Tactile features may pose a similar challenge, as they may highlight the book as an object, rather than as a symbol with information to be conveyed about the real world. These interactions between symbolic understanding and book features will be reviewed across various domains of learning below.

Analogical Reasoning

For successful transfer of complex information and concepts, children may need more than symbolic insight. To transfer basic information like the name of a novel animal from a picture book, children need to activate a representation of the animal in the book and remember details about its appearance to correctly apply the label to the real-world animal. To transfer more complex concepts, such as the ability for animals (in general) to use color camouflage to hide from predators, children must also recognize the abstract features of the depicted example and apply these to novel instances. Transferring conceptual information from one domain to another—in this case, from the picture book to the real world—requires children to recognize the abstract relational structure between the two domains (Gentner, 1989).

Children's ability to reason analogically depends somewhat on the difficulty of the task and their existing knowledge of the relations used in the analogy (Goswami, 1991). When they have experience in a domain, children as young as 1 or 2 years can use deep rather than surface features to solve analogical problems (e.g., Brown, 1990; Chen et al., 1997). However, when domain knowledge is limited, children without prior conceptual knowledge may be reliant on surface-level features to help them look for commonalities across analogical cases (Brown, 1989). One benefit of picture books as an educational resource is that they can provide children access to content that they would not experience in their day-to-day lives. However, this very feature of picture books may make analogical transfer especially difficult. For example, if children's understanding of color camouflage is tied to specific picture book illustrations (e.g., a frog) and surface features of that example (e.g., greenishness), they will likely fail to transfer the concept to other animals or contexts.

As with symbolic reasoning, various features of picture books may differentially affect children's ability to analogically transfer conceptual information in books. For example, given that perceptual similarity between transfer contexts facilitates analogical reasoning (Crisafi and Brown, 1986; Brown, 1989), children's transfer of new content from books with fantastical contexts and characters should be more impacted than transfer from books with realistic contexts and characters (Richert et al., 2009). If we expect children to learn and transfer novel content from picture books to a real-world context, stories that are more similar in surface structure to the real world would be easier for children to use a source of information about the world. Interactions between book features and analogical reasoning will be reviewed below.

Reasoning about Fantasy and Reality

Children also have the challenge of determining which information in picture books should even be transferred. Anthropomorphism, or animals with attributes characteristic of humans, may be especially confusing when some information is meant to generalize and other information is meant to be true only in the story world. For example, if the cavies in a story talk and wear clothes, children must separate this anthropomorphization of cavies from factual information, inhibit transferring the unrealistic attributes, and selectively transfer only the factual information presented. Children's learning from picture books must be selective in that they have to separate what information is fictional versus what could be true in reality, which is generally referred to as the “reader's dilemma” (Potts et al., 1989; Gerrig and Prentice, 1991).

The process of keeping real-world knowledge separate from fictional or false information encountered in a story context may be especially difficult in early childhood because children between the ages of 3 and 8 are just beginning to differentiate fantasy and reality (Woolley and Cox, 2007). According to Woolley and Ghossainy (2013) young children are “naïve skeptics” when it comes to judging the reality status of fictional information. Instead of over-incorporating fantastical information into their real-world concepts, children err on the side of rejecting factual information presented. For example, 4- to 8-year-olds were more likely to state that an improbable event is impossible than to accept an impossible event as possible (Shtulman and Carey, 2007). A bias toward skepticism may impede transfer of educational information, as children may tend to not transfer details they are uncertain are “real.”

The ability to accurately distinguish reality and fantasy may also be related to children's representational development. Corriveau and Harris (2015) found that 3- to 4-year-olds accurately distinguished historical and fantastical characters in narratives at the same time that they started passing false belief and false signs tasks, suggesting that an understanding of representation (both mental and symbolic) may underlie the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Picture books, both in terms of their prose and illustrations, may be designed to represent reality or to represent make-believe. Corriveau and Harris (2015) argue that children may have difficulty deciding which of the two functions a particular story may fulfill. Thus, children's ability to separate fantasy from reality may depend both on their recognition that a story stands for something and their ability to judge what that something is (reality or pretend). In addition, children's own experiences and background knowledge may influence the aspects of stories they view as realistic versus fantastical (Corriveau et al., 2015).

Books with unrealistic content, such as impossible events or anthropomorphic depictions of animals, may present a challenge to children in separating which aspects of the book apply to the real world and which belong only in the book. Therefore, we again expect books with realistic content to be more supportive of learning transfer, especially when learning conceptual information such as scientific facts and concepts. Although these book features interact with the two other developmental factors discussed above—symbolic development and analogical reasoning—we also expect the developing ability to reason about what is real and what is fantastical to constrain or enable learning and transfer.

Original Story: The Role of Book Features in Young Children's Transfer of Information from Picture Books to Real-World Contexts

Source: Strouse GA, Nyhout A and Ganea PA (2018) The Role of Book Features in Young Children's Transfer of Information from Picture Books to Real-World Contexts. Front. Psychol. 9:50. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00050