Review of “the Credible Shrinking Room: Very Young Children’s Performance With Symbolic and Nonsymbolic relations” This study is performed on 2.5 year olds, and tests their ability to use their knowledge of the location of a toy (Troll-doll named “Terry”) in a room (tent-like, with various pieces of common household furniture) to draw deductions as to where a miniature toy is located in a model replica (same fabrics, materials, etc.) of said room. There were two conditions. The 17 children in the nonsymbolic condition believed that a“shrinking machine” had caused the room the become smaller, whereas the 15 children in thesymbolic condition were told that the smaller room represented the larger room. The question iswhether the children would be able to associate the smaller room with the larger one, thus utilizingknowledge of symbols. The hypothesis is that because the scale model of the room is so interestingan object, the children will be unable to look at it while simultaneously thinking about its relationto the other room.In the symbolic task, the children were shown the large and small dolls, large and smallrooms, and were told of their formal relationships. The children watched as the experimenter hidthe doll somewhere in the large room, and were told that it would be in the same place in the smallerroom. After 10-15 minutes, the child was asked to find the doll in the smaller room. If they wereunable to find it, they were given prompts until retrieval. To succeed, the children had to realizethat the rooms were related. (The trials alternated between large to small room, then small to largeroom, in both the symbolic and nonsymbolic trials.)In the nonsymbolic task, the children were shown a doll and a room, and watched as thedoll was hidden within the room. (They were asked in about five minutes to find it, but as this wasa simple memory task, there was 100% success.) ...
