Didar Yanas 65793

Tilbe Goksun
PSYC 445
Reaction Paper 3

Pictorial Realism in Children’s 2D and 3D Representations

For a developing child picture books are a way to endorse learning new facts, concepts,
language, and values. A young child through joint picture book reading with a primary caregiver
is able to connect that the pictures act as symbols of entities in the external reality. Symbolic
development which is “understanding that a picture in a book is an object that represents another
entity” (Strouse et al., 2018, p.2) and analogical reasoning which is understanding the abstract
relation of the pictorial symbol and the real world are two important age-related developments
that children go through. In class we have discussed how children can recognize, extend, and
generalize a novel label of an object from a picture book to a real object. There was a significant
difference between 15- and 18-month olds based on how realistic the photographs and drawings
appeared with respect to their age. In this paper I will be discussing the important aspect of
pictorial realism for children to recognize, extend, and generalize information from 2D
representations to the real 3D environment.
Picture books are efficient tools to use with a developing child in order for them to learn
new information. Researchers have been interested in the degree to which children can
understand and relate what they have learned from books to the physical reality. From a young
age, children learn to flexibly use books as symbolic entities that represent information about the
world. Picture books differ in the degree of realism the convey from photographs to drawings to
cartoons. Iconicity is a term that refers to the “degree of physical resemblance between a picture
and its referent” (Ganea et al., 2008, p.49). Based on research conducted by Ganea et al. (2008),
15-month-old children were only able to recognize the cartoon object depicted in a picture book
from another picture in the recognition condition. They were unable to extend the cartoon object
from the picture book to the real object nor were they able to generalize it to a new object within
the same category. I think that based on this evidence children need to mature and develop their
symbolic and analogical reasoning to be able to extend and generalize from a less realistic
picture of an object. The reason for this is because cartoons are generally more ambiguous and
do not show as much of the characteristics of the given object. As mentioned previously,
analogical reasoning which is understanding the abstract relation of the symbol in a picture book
and its 3D version entails knowing more about the object than its superficial components. I
reason that children must go through a developmental period where they learn many new
relations of objects and how they interact in our environment before being able to make sense of
their cartoon versions. This is also made evident by Ganea et al. (2008) because compared to 15-
month old’s, 18-month olds yielded more significant results on the three different conditions of:
recognition, extension, and generalization. Although 18-month olds were not able to generalize
from cartoons to the 3D object, they were able to extend it to the actual object from a cartoon
depiction of it. This shows that within 3 months children who have maturational developed
further are slowly able to represent more complex and abstract things from 2D to 3D.
In my judgement, picture books with higher iconicity allow for children to better
understand the entity as representative of an object in the physical reality. In the experiment by
Ganea et al. 2008) 18-month old’s were able to recognize, extend, and generalize from both
photographs and drawings of the object. They were not able to generalize from a cartoon
depiction. This proves that iconicity is an important tool in the development of picture books as
it allows children to make sense of the picture depiction of either an object or the abstract
relations of it. From this research I understood that the more realistic the 2D representation
looks, the pre-reader (child) is able to learn from a picture book and represent the object in the
real world. Therefore, during the developmental period parents should utilize books with more
naturalistic or realistic object representations as this would strengthen the child’s ability to
extend and generalize it to their external environment.
 References

Ganea, P. A., Pickard, M. B., & DeLoache, J. S. (2008). Transfer between picture books and the
real world by very young children. Journal of Cognition and Development, 9(1), 46–66.
https://doi.org/10.1080/15248370701836592

Strouse, G. A., Nyhout, A., & Ganea, P. A. (2018). The role of book features in young children's
transfer of information from picture books to real-world contexts. Frontiers in
Psychology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00050