Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 364

Although young children typically perform poorly on conservation tasks, 4-year-old children can be taught to conserve, suggesting that children’s difficulties with reversibility and conservation tasks can be overcome (Gallagher, 2008). In addition, making the task relevant improves children’s performance. For example, when children are asked to play a trick on someone (i.e., “let’s pretend that this sponge is a rock and tell Anne that it is a rock when it really is a sponge”) or choose an object that can be used to clean spilled water, many choose the sponge, illustrating that they can form a dual representation of the sponge as an object that looks like a rock (Sapp, Lee, & Muir, 2000). Three-year-old children can shift between describing the real and fake or imagined aspects of an object or situation. In addition, they can describe misleading appearances and functions of objects in response to natural conversational prompts, as compared with the more formal language in the typical prompts used in traditional appearance–reality tasks (e.g., “What is it really and truly?”) (Deák, 2006). In sum, preschoolers show an understanding of the appearance–reality distinction, and it develops throughout childhood (Woolley & Ghossainy, 2013).