When Seeing is Not Believing: Two-Year-Olds' Use of Video Representations to Find a Hidden Toy

Research on children's understanding of video has shown seeming contradictions. Fourteen-month-olds imitate actions seen on TV (Meltzoff, 1988) and 18-month-olds are reminded of an event by watching video (Sheffield & Hudson, 2003) but 24-month-olds fail at a video-mediated object-retrieval task requiring dual representational understanding (Troseth & DeLoache, 1998). Experiments 1, 2A, and 2B tested whether changes to the video object-retrieval task that require imitation instead of retrieval would make it easier. Experiment 1 compared replications of Troseth and DeLoache's (1998) window retrieval and video retrieval conditions as well as window imitation and video imitation conditions, in which children imitated the act of finding a toy, to chance performance. Twenty-four-month-olds performed worse in the imitation conditions. Follow-up experiments showed that 24-month-olds'performance improved when an imitation search task included a goal but not when a retrieval task included a goal. Children transferred success after goal-based imitation to object retrieval. Implications for dual representation and the role of competing representations in the object-retrieval task are discussed.