How children identify events from visual experience

Abstract

Three experiments explored how well children recognize events from different types of visual experience: either by directly seeing an event or by indirectly experiencing it from post-event visual evidence. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5- to 6-year-old Turkish-speaking children (n = 32) successfully recognized events through either direct or indirect visual access. In Experiment 2, a new group of 4- and 5- to 6-year-olds (n = 37) reliably attributed event recognition to others who had direct or indirect visual access to events (even though performance was lower than Experiment 1). In both experiments, although children's accuracy improved with age, there was no difference between the two types of access. Experiment 3 replicated the findings from the youngest participants of Experiments 1 and 2 with a matched sample of English-speaking 4-year-olds (n = 37). Thus children can use different kinds of visual experience to support event representations in themselves and others.