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However, child researchers argue that iconicity plays a small part in acquiring the symbolic function of pictures. “One reason that iconicity should not be considered criterial in thinking about symbols is that even the most realistic color photograph expresses a point of view regarding its referent” (DeLoache, 2004). That is, there is a symbolic aspect in even highly iconic pictures. This is certainly true, but more from an outside perspective. For the child there is definitely an unambiguous “referent,”

which is the perceived object in the photograph, regardless of “expressed points of views.” Iconicity is of course central in this process and is necessary for learning the referential nature of pictures in terms of similarity and differentiation.

DeLoache et al. (2004a) for example brought differentiation into the picture when they made 2.5-year-olds train on photographs and subsequently perform bet-ter than 3-year-olds on scale-model tasks. This was a very different solution from putting the scale model behind a window to minimise its object properties. How-ever, it served a similar differentiating role. Reference was possible in the photograph condition just because it was sufficiently differentiated from the real world, but still had a striking likeness to it in virtue of being photographic. Would reference have turned up as effectively if drawings had been used instead?

Although I admit that realistic pictures are perhaps in minority in an infant’s up-bringing, and probably not the typical path towards reference, I would not exclude the possibility that iconicity can be a way into reference until it has been tested more thoroughly. Pictorial competence is after all an ability, or abilities, with a cultural foundation, and as such there can be many paths to the same end state. The typical route might not be the most effective one.

imitation of a contemplative stance does not mean that the infants can use pictures as referential, although it can certainly look like it.

That older infants model only actions on pictures and not on objects Callaghan et al. (2004) attribute to social uncertainty about the proper actions towards strange objects. Ways of handling ordinary objects were already familiar by the time the subjects came to the study, but conventions with laminated pictures handled by ex-perimenters were not. From this reasoning follows that pictorial media must always be new and strange if infants are to imitate conventional actions towards it. Indeed, whenever a pictorial medium is new to an infant in the course of its upbringing, adults around it act towards it in a contemplative rather than manipulative fashion, since that is the common stance towards pictures. Thus, from early on the infant is exposed to differential adult attitudes towards objects and their pictures, and are furthermore motivated to imitate contemplative stances towards pictures if unsure about their nature. As indeed shown by Gelman et al. (2005) objects and pictures do elicit different interactions between adults and infants. Objects for example gen-erate talk about individual items, while pictures gengen-erate talk about categories. This pattern is seen in both children (2-3 years old) and their caretakers.

Callaghan et al. (2004) attributed the younger infants’ failure to copy the con-templative stance to the insensitivity to communicative intentions that infants hold before 12-24 months of age, clearly inspired by the research of developmental psy-chologist (and primatologist) Tomasello (e.g. 1999). However, the infants did not copy the manipulative stance either, perhaps saying more about copying abilities than anything pictorial. As mentioned, the contemplative stance was directed to-wards the motif of the pictures, why it is not surprising that photographs and objects are treated in an identical fashion. The assumption that intention-reading and picto-rial reference is intimately linked is a plausible one, but still an assumption. One must separate the intentional use of pictures in social interactions of various types, from the interpretation and meaning of pictures as they stand on their own. If one puts all the focus on uses, one denies the fact that pictures are connected to the world in ways which symbols (conventional signs) are not, i.e. through iconicity (see Chapter 4).

The following is an example of an alternative view. As a group, both children di-agnosed with autism and children with mental handicaps passed an adapted version of the object-retrieval test, both with photographs and scale models, but just as aver-age children they were somewhat better in the photographic condition (Charman &

Baron-Cohen, 1995). We have been told that people with autism are particularly insensitive to the intent of others, but still they pass DeLoache’s object-retrieval tasks.

The main reason for suspecting that the role of reading referential acts, e.g. pointing, (which should not be confused with reading minds) is helpful in developing a pic-ture concept is the proven role of those abilities in word learning, which is in place at 19 - 20 months (Baldwin, 1993). It seems unlikely that those resources are not recruited in learning about pictures as well. However, from this one should not con-clude that there is therefore a “single symbolic competence” that is unveiled across media.

Intentional use can indeed help to specify a pictorial referent. For example, the same photograph can refer to the particular entity that is depicted, the event the en-tity is taking part in, to a category of which the enen-tity is a member etc., and the in-tentional use of the photograph can help pinpoint this. Recognising that the use is intentional might be crucial in this process. But intention is in this case only a spe-cific form of context. The same referential judgement can be made from other con-textual cues, such as exclusion, salience, or from plain experience.

It has for example been thought for a long time that children learn new words only if they have reasons to believe that the person using the word is naming some-thing (e.g. Baldwin & Moses, 2001). However, in for example a test using referen-tial ambiguity, children with autism performed as well as average 2 year old children when mapping new words to unnamed objects and pictures of objects, including line drawings (Preissler & Carey, 2005). The children with autism were described as

“impaired in monitoring referential intent,” but still they had no problem to infer that what was called a novel name did not pertain to an object with a familiar name.

Children 2.5 – 4 years old interpret the same picture differently, as shown in their naming, if they are told that the picture is an accident with paint, than when they are told that someone has worked on the picture (Gelman & Ebeling, 1998).

But by this time children already know that there are pictures and non-pictures. To know whether an object is intentionally crafted or not just helps them to apply this distinction. Similarly, objects that are presented with a story about intentional crea-tion are named as artefacts (e.g. knife) while objects that are presented as accidental get named based on its physical properties (e.g. steel) (Gelman & Bloom, 2000).

But this is also just a test of how naming works, not why naming is possible and whether “reading intentions” plays a necessary role in starting up that ability.

To return to Judy DeLoache’s research. 2-year-olds that fail in scale-model tasks, or fail to see video information as displaced in time and space, can solve tasks by being made to believe that the room has been shrunk (DeLoache, 2004) or that the TV is actually a window (Troseth & DeLoache, 1998). They can also be helped by in-struction. There seems to be a “need for the experimenter to make the intentional basis for the symbol - referent relation clear by explaining everything about the task”

(DeLoache, 2004). Why is it not enough to explain only the intentional basis? Eve-rything else about the task has to be explained too, including the spatial similarities between two spaces.17

On a different note, the beneficial effects of instruction do not mean that all other paths are closed. The transformation of video information into window in-formation also helps young children. Then differentiation, and not intentions, seems to be the central factor. Is for example knowledge about what cameras do in the world knowledge about intentions? Can one learn differentiation by learning what cameras do? (Although not a typical development it is not implausible.)

When interpreting photographs it has been found that 3, 5 and 7-year old chil-dren attribute changes in depicted viewing angles to changes in the referent, not movement of the photographer or camera. And if they do not detect a change in the

17 However, Salsa & Peralta de Mendoza (2007) claim that 2.5 year olds benefit more from having the intentional basis for a relation explained than having the correspondence pointed out.

referent they can even have difficulties separating pictures that depict the same scene but from strikingly different angles (Liben, 2003). This effect decreases with age.

These phenomena can be an expression of still having one leg in the grips of a reality mode understanding despite having a pictorial mode conceptualisation regarding photographs. Or to relate it to the dual-representation hypothesis, instead of per-formance being obscured by the physical properties of the picture, the properties of the medium is obscured by the referent. The children are somehow inside the pho-tographs, and when inside, when something changes it must be the referent. The inability to take the photographers viewpoint and move around with it may also be attributed to a lack in perspective taking and not at all confined to the photographic domain. If that is the case it might not be photographic concepts as such that de-velop from 3 to 7 years, but social-cognitive ones. Whatever the case, and this is my point, first-hand experience with photographing ought to affect the ability to under-stand photographic viewpoints.

Callaghan (1999) postulates, inspired by the research of DeLoache and colleagues, that the developmental trajectory for pictorial competence is that first a picture is seen as equal to its referent (picture-as-referent), followed by the picture being an interesting object in its own right (picture-as-object), presumably because of how adults act with pictures (see above), and lastly pictures become symbols (pictures-as-symbols).

Perhaps Callaghan’s trajectory is indeed a better order than the one I propose, if I would claim that pictorial mode stems from reality mode or surface mode. However, I am not that concerned about order, and my hierarchy is not primarily about the development of picture understanding, but a way to categorise different modes of performance with pictures. I imagine that pictures can appear as interesting objects regardless of a phase of pictures-as-referents, but I do believe that pictures-as-objects must precede pictures-as-symbols, but not necessarily as separate steps in develop-ment. I think of it in terms of attention. The subject must attend to pictures for the referential nature to reveal itself at all, and social processes help to guide attention towards pictures as an object category, as well as appropriate parts of pictures. How-ever, I believe that the scientific focus on intentions, as in mind reading, exaggerates its role in this process. Intention reading is still poorly defined, and it does away with the role of iconicity in a worrying way. I do believe that “reading” intentional behaviour is helpful, again for attention directing purposes. I think differentiation is key in the process, but differentiation can take many forms, of which the socio-cognitive route is only one, albeit possibly an effective one.

Can pictorial reference be discovered on one’s own or must it be pointed out, and how “intersubjective” does this process has to be? This issue has partly been a driv-ing question behind my own empirical investigations, where picture naïve apes have been given pictorial tasks (see Part III).