CASOS REALES DE ACCIDENTE EN ESPACIOS CONFINADOS

Once children understand that pictures are vehicles for symbolic communication, how do they decipher what exactly is represented in a specific

picture? This important question directly relates to a centuries-old philosophical debate over what makes a picture represent its referent in the mind o f a viewer. One school of thought captures the “common-sense” notion that picture-referent relations are determined entirely by resemblance - the extent to which perceptual properties o f an image and an object overlap (e.g. Hopkins, 1995, 1998; Hyman, 2006; Peacocke,

1987). Thus, a picture represents a cat only if it provides viewers with the same category-defining perceptual information that they would derive from observing a real cat (Neander, 1987). This principle underlies the theory of naive realism, which posits that young children process pictures exclusively in terms of their resemblances to objects in the world, ignoring factors external to the image such as the artist’s intentions (Freeman, 1991; Freeman & Sanger, 1995). Hence, to a naive realist, a picture that looks like a cat is “a cat”, even if the artist intended to represent a dog.

However, there are several criticisms of the pure resemblance account o f pictorial representation. Firstly, Goodman (1976) argues that resemblance alone cannot explain the representational qualities of pictures. He points out that while resemblance is symmetrical (a picture of a red car resembles a real red car, and vice versa) symbolic representation is asymmetrical (a picture of a red car represents a real red car, whereas a real red car does not represent a picture of a red car). This criticism implicitly highlights the fact that pictures, unlike their referents (in the majority of cases), are intended to be representational. Secondly, Browne and Woolley’s (2001) observation that “a portrait intended to portray person X equally resembles X ’s identical twin, Y, yet we would not say that the picture actually represents the two twins equally” (p. 390) illustrates that even the interpretation of highly iconic pictures requires the observer to consider more than just resemblance. Thirdly, the pure resemblance-based account cannot adequately explain how humans are able to

attribute and extract meaning from non-iconic pictures that do not resemble anything. Representational ambiguity can be the calculated result of an artist’s desire to depart from reality and portray a referent without the use of naturalistic visual references. Although uniformed viewers may find it extremely difficult to decode the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky or Joan Miro, few would question their statuses as symbolic representations.

Building on the notion that a picture’s referential meaning transcends its perceptual features, contemporary theorists purport that the inference o f

communicative intentions underlies picture comprehension (e.g. Bloom, 1996; Bloom & Markson, 1998; Preissler & Bloom, 2008; Rochat & Callaghan, 2005; Taylor,

1998). According to their intentional account, a picture’s referent is whatever object the artist intended to depict, and resemblance merely serves as a window to those intentions. For example, if we see a picture that possesses the perceptual

characteristics of a cat, the meaning we derive from that picture is based on an inference about the artist’s referential intentions. This inference is guided by resemblance - if a drawing looks like a cat, it is highly probable that the artist intended to represent a cat (Bloom & Markson, 1998). However, a high level of iconicity (the degree to which a picture resembles its intended referent) is not

necessary for a referential relation to exist. Thus, according to intentional theorists, it is perfectly acceptable to call a roughly-drawn rectangle “a cat” if we have reason to believe that its creator intended the image to represent a cat.

In the context of developmental psychology, one might predict that children start life as na'ive realists, interpreting pictures exclusively in terms of their perceptual features, and gradually leam the intentional basis of pictorial representation as they acquire experience of creating and interpreting pictures, whilst developing an

increasingly sophisticated theory of mind. However, empirical evidence suggests that children derive referential meaning from artists’ intentions by 2- to 3-years of age. In their classic study, Bloom and Markson (1998) asked 3- and 4-year-olds to draw pairs of objects that closely resembled each other, such as a balloon and a lollipop.

Following a distraction task, the experimenter asked participants to name their own drawings. Predictably, the pairs of pictures produced by the young children were virtually indistinguishable, and thus could not be accurately matched to their original referents based on resemblance alone. Nevertheless, the authors reported that 3- and 4- year-olds correctly named 76% and 87% of their drawings respectively. These

findings show that toddlers consider their original representational intentions in addition to appearance when assigning meaning to their own pictures. In fact, a child’s protestations resulting from the experimenter calling their balloon picture “a lollipop” would suggest that representational intentions are a more decisive influence on toddlers’ picture comprehension than similarity of shape. Moreover, the referential identities that young toddlers assign to their graphic productions are highly consistent, even after delays as long as 3 months (Gross & Hayne, 1999).

Yet more remarkable is the finding that young toddlers perform mentalistic reasoning when interpreting ambiguous pictures created by others (Gelman &

Ebeling, 1998; Priessler & Bloom, 2008). Gelman and Ebeling (1998) showed 2- and 3-year-olds a series of line drawings roughly shaped like familiar nameable objects (e.g. a kite). Half of the children were informed that the pictures had been created intentionally (e.g. someone painted a picture), while the other half were told that the pictures had been created by accident (e.g. someone spilled some paint). At test, children were more likely to name the ambiguous pictures according to shape (thus regarding them as symbolic representations) when they believed the pictures to be

intentional, rather than accidental, creations. In another study, 2-year-olds watched an experimenter produce an ambiguous line drawing that looked equally like two visible unfamiliar objects (Priessler & Bloom, 2008). When asked to extend a novel label from the picture, the majority of children generalised the word to the object that the artist had been gazing at whilst drawing, indicating that they perceived this object to be the picture’s intended referent. Together, these studies suggest that, between 2- and 3-years of age, children consider intentional information when comprehending

pictures created by themselves and others.

While these studies indicate that young toddlers are sensitive to artists’ intentions when comprehending pictures, they do not directly assess the relative importance of intentions and resemblance. Other studies have examined this issue by pitting these cues in direct conflict. Browne and Woolley (2001) showed 4-year-olds, 7-year-olds and adults a puppet show in which the protagonist announced his intention to draw a bear, but actually produced a picture that resembled a rabbit. Subsequently, 84 to 100 percent of each age group named the picture according to its appearance (e.g. a rabbit) rather than the artist’s stated intentions (e.g. a bear). In a similar study by Richert and Lillard (2002), children aged 4 to 8 years comprehended drawings after being provided with explicit information about the knowledge of the artist. At the start of the procedure, children were introduced to a troll who was said to be from a distant land where no animals existed. The children then watched the troll create a picture that looked exactly like a fish, but were informed that the artist had neither seen nor heard of fish before. When asked whether the troll was in fact drawing “a fish”, all but the eldest children responded in the affirmative, thus failing to consider the mental state of the artist (i.e. one cannot draw a fish if one does not know what a fish is).

suggest that if a picture is sufficiently recognisable, resemblance rather than intent determines what it represents for both children and adults. However, it may be that the findings of these studies were biased by the conflict between children’s existing knowledge of pictures and the extremely unusual task demands. Through countless hours of joint picture-book reading interactions with adults, children in modem cultures leam that the appearance of a picture tends to be highly congruent with its intended referential meaning. That is, if a drawing looks like X, it is highly likely that its creator intended it to represent X. By contrast, it is extremely irregular to encounter a drawing that is intended to represent X, but looks uniquely like another category member, Y (Bloom & Markson, 1998). As pictures are deliberately created to

communicate a specific message to viewers, it is illogical that an artist would create a picture of Y when they intend to direct viewers’ thoughts towards X. Yet this is the scenario that was presented to children in these two studies.

While it may be inconceivable that an artist would draw one thing whilst intending to represent something entirely different, it is culturally acceptable to assign meaning to pictures that do not appear to resemble anything (e.g. abstract art).

Therefore, studying how children interpret abstract pictures may provide a more ecologically valid method of assessing the relative importance of resemblance and representational intent. To date, very few studies have examined children’s

comprehension of abstract pictures, with Bloom and Markson (1998) being a notable exception. In their “Size Task”, 3- and 4-year-olds were shown pairs of differently- sized scribbles that had supposedly been drawn by a child with a broken arm. For each pair of scribbles, the experimenter explained that the artist had attempted to draw two objects - one large (e.g. an elephant) and one small (e.g. a mouse). Crucially, the

pictures looked nothing like the named objects, and could only be matched to their intended referents based on relative size. When asked to describe each pair of pictures, the children reported that the large shape represented the large named object (e.g. an elephant) and the small picture represented the small named object (e.g. a mouse). The authors claimed that participants had reflected on the intentions o f the artist, perhaps reasoning that it would be logical for an individual with a broken arm to represent an elephant and a mouse as differently-sized scribbles.

However, it is possible that children used non-intentional reasoning to complete the Size Task. Rather than considering how the artist may have distinguished their intended referents following the loss of fine motor control, participants may have simply noted the parallel between the relative sizes of the scribbles and the named objects, and assigned names to the drawings without

considering the role of the artist or perceiving the drawings as referential symbols. If the intentional information provided by the experimenter did not factor in the

children’s reasoning, they may not have believed that the scribbles were created with the intention of representing the named objects. If this was the case, Bloom and Makson (1998) may have overestimated young children’s referential understanding of abstract pictures and underestimated the importance of perceptual similarity to their comprehension of pictures drawn by others.

In summary, there is evidence that young TD children derive meaning from the communicative intentions underlying pictures (Bloom & Markson, 1998; Gelman & Ebeling, 1998; Preissler & Bloom, 2008), however, there is counter evidence that resemblance is the relatively more important cue (Browne & Woolley, 2001; Richert & Lillard, 2002), but these findings are potentially flawed. Thus, the question of how TD children map pictures to objects remains open. Furthermore, there is reason to

believe that children with ASD might weight communicative intentions and resemblance differently when mapping picture-referent relations. In Allen (2009), children with ASD watched an adult turn towards one of two named objects on a table, and produce a drawing that resembled both objects equally. When asked to label the picture, children with ASD named the object that was in the experimenter’s line of sight on just 25% of trials, whereas TD children made the same response on 75% of trials. These findings suggest that, unlike their typically developing peers, children with ASD do not use intentional information to decode the referents of ambiguous pictures drawn by others.

One possibility that is investigated in later chapters is that picture

comprehension in children with ASD conforms to the theory of nai've realism. That is, due to their great difficulty understanding the intentions of others in social-

communicative situations (Baron-Cohen, 1989, 1995; Charman et al., 1997; Griffin, 2002; Hobson, 2002; Mundy & Willoughby, 1996), picture comprehension in autism may privilege resemblance and neglect external sources of meaning that are not immediately perceptible (e.g. the artist’s intentions, whether the picture was created accidentally, expectations of the viewer). If so, to a child with autism, a picture that resembles a cat is “a cat”, even if the artist intended to represent a dog.