Just imagine

As humans, imagination is one of our most wonderful traits. It is what lets us laugh at a joke, appreciate a good book, even empathize with our fellow human beings. Thanks to our imagination, we can picture a funny event, conjure images of vistas described in a travelogue, and put ourselves in someone else's shoes. At it's most basic level, imagination allows us to form representations of things, and people that are not present at that moment, or events that happened in the past or will take place in the future. In fact, our memories could be thought of as representations.

While telling your toddler about somebody who's not present, like Grandma, have you ever wondered whether your little tot can actually think about Grandma when you talk about her? It turns out that not-quite-2-year-olds do have the beginnings of an imagination!

Studies done in the 1970's by pioneering scientists such as Janellen Huttenlocher showed us that babies who are just over a year a old can understand references to a familiar object that is absent at that moment. That is, if you mention the name of a familiar toy to a 13- to 14-month-old such as "Teddy!" or "Doggy!", the baby will start looking for it, even if that toy is not visible at that moment. This tells us that by the time they're past their first birthday, babies have some sort of mental representation of familiar objects. In other words, the beginnings of an imagination.

More recently, a series of ingenious studies by Boston University researcher, Patricia Ganea and her colleagues have shown us how this ability develops between a child's first and second birthday.

One of the first questions the researchers asked was, " If babies can remember familiar objects, can they also remember an object that they've recently learned a name for?" The answer was a yes! In order to find out, the researchers taught 13- and 14-month- olds a proper name for a stuffed toy. So, they 'introduced' the baby to a stuffed frog, let the baby play with this toy and while playing with it, told the baby that the frog was called 'Lucy'. The name was repeated several times, after which the stuffed frog was removed from view. Now, when the baby heard the name 'Lucy', the baby spontaneously started searching for the frog! This shows us that babies that are just over a year old can 'think' of a familiar toy when that toy is named, and can also 'remember' a relatively novel toy when that toy is mentioned. However, one must note that at this age this memory or representation is fairly fragile. That is, if there is a delay between learning the name for a new toy and when the name is mentioned in the absence of the toy, babies are less likely to search for the toy.

Well, it's one thing to remember an object when you hear the name, but it's quite another to update that representation if you're given some additional information about that object. For example, suppose Grandma tells you on the phone that she's dyed her hair purple, you would be able to picture her with purple hair, even if you hadn't actually seen her yet. It would be a disturbing image, but you could do it!

Similarly, the next question that Ganea and her colleagues asked was 'what is the youngest age at which children can update their representations of objects based on verbal information?' The study was done with children of two age groups- a group of 1.5- year -olds and a second group of almost 2- year-olds (22- month-olds). Just like in the previous study, stuffed animals were used. Toddlers were 'introduced' to 3 stuffed animals, two of which were identical (stuffed frogs) and a third animal that was different ( a stuffed pig). The children were told that one of the frogs was called 'Lucy', the other frog was 'Lucy's friend' (and this frog was placed on a little stool where he/she could 'watch the others play'), and the stuffed pig was simply called 'the piggy'. This was done to ensure that children had equal amounts of 'face-time' or experience with each of the stuffed animals.

After being allowed to play with the stuffed toys for a few minutes, the children were taken to another room. Soon another researcher came into this room with a little bucket of water and announced that she was going 'to wash the table in the other room'. At this time, the children were encouraged to look at the water and touch it. The researcher left the room and returned in a few minutes, now announcing that 'she had spilled water on Lucy and Lucy was all wet!'. Then the children were taken back to the original room where 3 trays were placed on a low table, one containing a wet stuffed frog, a second containing a dry stuffed frog and the third containing a wet stuffed pig. The children were now asked to 'find Lucy'.

What did the children do? It turns out that most of the older children (the 22-month-olds) correctly identified the wet frog as Lucy, but most of the 1.5 -year- olds did not! These younger kids were just as likely to pick the dry frog as the wet frog. By demonstrating that it is sometime in the second half of their second year that children learn to use verbal information to update their mental images, these studies provide us with a little peep-hole into how imagination and the relationship between language and imagination develops in our children's minds.