Do you know a child that do not like it?

Best regards

ingrid garcia

I would appreciate hearing answers regarding the questions in the original discussion. Thank you.

Kelley Donner This is an interesting question. Visual symbols are used very often with children who are on the autism spectrum or have other communication or processing difficulties. They tend to be simple pictures, intended to have meanings that are as clear as possible, and the same picture always means the same thing (though I have noticed some small differences across settings or different countries). Apologies if some of what I am telling you might be things you know already, but here is a link to a professional talking about Boardmaker.

https://goboardmaker.com/blogs/news/boardmaker-benefits

Another system I have seen used in schools is called PECS.

I think your question pertains more to pictures that require interpretation or inference. Many autistic children can be fascinated by images, or specific books or characters, but might interact with these in a very repetitive, comfort-seeking way, or take more interest in small details rather than meaning. In some of my past work with families of children (including some on the autism spectrum) who need to work on inference and theory of mind (i.e., others' thoughts, knowledge, feelings, experiences), I have suggested using books or cartoons to help talk to the child about what a character might be thinking/ feeling, and why.

I remember a study I had read about years ago, a kind of story-telling TOM assessment where a child is asked not to tell the witch where the princess is hiding. Few 3-year-olds were able to lie, even when they did not want the witch to find the princess, but with age/ maturity, more children aged 4 or 5 were able to lie to the witch. I didn't find a link about that, but I did find an article about the Sally Anne test, which is a similar but less emotive principle:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2017/jan/23/sally-anne-task-psychological-experiment-post-truth-false-beliefs

this article, which touches on using this or similar tests with young people who are affected by intellectual disability or autism:

https://www.spectrumnews.org/opinion/game-tests-theory-of-mind-in-autism-intellectual-disability/

and also this study:

Article Theory-of-Mind Training Causes Honest Young Children to Lie

Intriguingly, the suggestion that at least developmentally typical 3-year-olds can be taught to lie, has a variety of implications. On a side note, I do wonder if there's an element of the Flynn effect here, not just for cognitive abilities but a kind of savvy/ curtailing of innocence inherent to our culture that exposes more and younger children to arguably more cynical subject matter and communication, but I digress!

In the piece from Spectrum News, it looked like there were not so much significant differences between the ASD and non-ASD participants, whereas there were more likely to be differences depending on cognitive ability and perhaps in particular, verbal ability (I just skimmed it, did not read in depth).

I realise I have not answered your question, but that's a good thing - it's not a simple matter! Hopefully, I may have given you some ideas of additional avenues to investigate as part of your query. Good luck!

Hi Elizabeth. Thank you for your long answer. I began by been studying primary school early readers and their illustrations and was frustrated with just how many require quite skilled second-order perspective for comprehension. I then continued on to look at children's books and children's illustrations in general. In addition, I found it strange that the there are very few examples of illustrations used in false-belief tests as these are quite interesting to study to see how differently they could be interpreted. I thought one of the first places to look to see the importance of illustration in theory of mind research would be to look at what illustrations are actually used in academic research of theory of mind and why it was used.

I was just reading an article yesterday about a medical study where the research was about how the medical illustrations are interpreted based on how abstract they were presented. Unfortunately, the illustrations used in the research were from three different artists and thus varied in style. This alone could be a contributing factor to interpretation and comprehension. I sincerely wish that more thought were given to the illustrations and visuals used in research and think this is an area that needs a lot more research.

Unfortunately, the illustrations to some of the texts in children's books are not always in accordance with the age characteristics of the children - with their intellectual and emotional development. This depends on the competencies of the authors of the books, as they set the criteria for the nature of the drawings. Unfortunately, in recent years I find many illustrations that are incomprehensible to an adult reader - the images are not real and look abstract. I compared with illustrations in older books where everything is natural and attracts the child's interest.

Like any other information, illustrations should be adapted to the development of the child's brain. This is especially true of the theory of mind, which is directly related to the development of executive functions and emotional reflection. Child neuropsychology is the one that can shed much light on this issue.

Best regards,

Neli Vasileva

Thank you for your reply Neli. I agree with you that many children's books do not take the age characteristics of the children into consideration. I wish that more publishers would consider this as it is something that really frustrates me. I think they too often write the books for the parents, and not for the children. Many times I have read a book and realized that even though I enjoyed the story, my children did not understand its true intention. Unfortunately, I do not think that older books are any better even if their images are more realistic. If anything, many older books tried hard to push morals through the use of complicated analogies and imagery. Little Red Riding Hood, for example, was really not a story about a girl and a wolf. I think abstract images are not a problem as long as the metaphor for what they are representing is clear. Children are quite capable of fantasy. I find it more problematic when an image has multiple perspectives and requires a child to use complicated second-order perspective skills for comprehension. Often in picture books (as well as early-readers), a child is required to interpret the images, and not just the text, in order to understand the story. If they do not have the necessary theory of mind skills to do this, they may misunderstand the story.