Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans possess a remarkable capacity to create and understand abstract representations, such as pictures. U.S. 18-month-olds understand that pictures refer to objects; however, less is known about how this understanding develops. We testthe hypothesis that understanding the representational nature of pictures requires frequent experience with pictures, byworking with rural Kenyan toddlers with few visual symbols in their early environments.We taught rural Kenyan toddlers a novel word (dax) for a picture of a novel object. We then presented the picture and theobject to toddlers and asked them to point to the dax, reasoning that toddlers would select the object if they understoodthat pictures are representations of objects.Surprisingly, only half the sample learned the novel word. Moreover, the toddlers who learned the word selected be-tween the picture and object randomly. We discuss follow-up studies to continue exploring the development of pictorialcompetence across early environments.