Is it life or is it Memorex? Video as a representation of reality

This paper offers an overview of research on infants’ early behavior toward televised images, followed by an account of the development of representational competence with video. Several aspects of representation are involved in young children’s understanding and use of video. From a very young age, children form mental representations of the contents of video, making sense of realistic images of familiar things. Children also notice and represent information regarding video itself (e.g., its 2-dimensionality). An important development occurs when children represent the relation between video and reality: at first, toddlers appear to categorize video as separate from reality, but eventually children recognize realistic video images as physical representations (symbols) of events they have not directly perceived. A mature representation of video takes into account genre (e.g., news, drama) and reality status based on recognition that video can (but does not always) represent real events.