Can 24-Month-Old Toddlers Transfer Their Representational Insights from Video to Pictures?
Liu, Eylon
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2019-04-24
Abstract
Representational media are everywhere in children’s daily lives: the photos on the wall, the videos shown on TV, and the picture books children read. In order to foster better learning and develop more age-appropriate interactive media for children, prior researchers have explored young children’s ability to understand these representational media, including photos and videos. In the current study, 24-month-olds’ ability to utilize and apply information from video and pictures to solve tasks in the real world was tested. Replicating two of the conditions in Troseth, Saylor, and Archer (2006)’s study, the current study investigated if a five-minute interactive, contingent video experience could facilitate children’s use of information from video to solve an object retrieval task, compared to a controlled group. As a transfer task, children participated in an object retrieval task using photos on the following day. This task explored whether experience with contingent video (video chat) would promote children’s understanding of representations more generally. A significant positive correlation was found between children’s performance on the first day and the second day, and children's language skill also displayed a significant positive correlation with children's performance. However, children in the interactive video condition in the current study did not perform as well as in the Troseth et al. (2006) study. With the support from a follow-up CCTV condition (with a full-sized video screen), it was conjectured that the children's lower performance in the video condition resulted from a lack of parental support while co-viewing the video chat with their child.