At what age can children distinguish what an object looks like from what it really is?

Details

The research examined the development of representations of objects' perceptual and functional properties using appearance–reality tasks with 64 children aged 3–5 years.

The tasks included various ambiguous objects: realistic and symbolic objects, as well as fictional objects presented in a cartoon. These allowed the researchers to manipulate how closely the function suggested by an object's appearance matched the function associated with its reality.

The aim was to study children's ability to switch representations of an object using a balanced paradigm: returning from reality to appearance after a demonstration of the real property, and returning from appearance to reality with a demonstration of the fictional property.

Among 3-year-olds, “phenomenist errors” predominated for symbolic objects and the cartoon task, whereas “realist errors” predominated for realistic objects. The responses of 4-year-olds were characterized by a focus on functional properties across all tasks.

It was only from age 5 that children resolved the problem of the object's identity and could easily switch representations. The results were discussed with particular emphasis on H. Wallon's theory.