Representation and Perseveration: Influences on Young Children's Representational Insight

We carried out 3 experiments to determine what role different task demands play in 2.5-year-old children's performance on DeLoache's (1987) model-room task. The results of Experiment 1 reveal that the size of the toy to be retrieved had little bearing on performance; only the size of the spaces affected performance. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the large number of perseverative errors produced by children in these tasks was not reduced when the toy on each of the 4 test trials was changed and, thus, further suggested that characteristics of the toy had little influence on performance. Experiment 3 showed that elimination of the possibility of perseverative response through removal of the previously used hiding locations did not facilitate transfer. The results point to conceptual inflexibility or difficulty of engagement in dual representation associated with the search space as important contributors to the lack of representational insight demonstrated by 2.5-year-old children.