Appearance-Reality Distinction: Children's Understanding of the Physical and Affective Domains

The relation between children's performance on physical and affective appearance-reality (AR) tasks was investigated with a within-subjects design. Children participated in a standard color physical task (a color cutout behind a filter) and an affective measure that used stories and pictures de...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Developmental psychology 1993-09, Vol.29 (5), p.907-914
Main Authors: Friend, Margaret, Davis, Teresa L
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Affective Behavior
Age Differences
Appearance Reality Distinction
Biological and medical sciences
Child development
Children & youth
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive aspects
Cognitive Development
Color Perception
Concept Formation
Developmental psychology
Elementary Education
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Perceived Reality
Physical Environment
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reality
Social Perception
Social research
Thinking Skills
Understanding
Young Children
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Summary:The relation between children's performance on physical and affective appearance-reality (AR) tasks was investigated with a within-subjects design. Children participated in a standard color physical task (a color cutout behind a filter) and an affective measure that used stories and pictures depicting characters who were hiding their emotions. The performance of 147 4- to 8-year-olds was examined under conditions of varying task similarity. As expected, older children performed better than younger children on both tasks. More important, children's physical and affective AR performance differed significantly only when the affective task required a greater use of inference than the physical task. Results are discussed in terms of the general representational ability underlying AR performance across domains and the ecological validity of these findings.
ISSN:0012-1649
1939-0599
DOI:10.1037/0012-1649.29.5.907