Understanding the creator's intention helps 24-and 26-month-olds use picture mediated information as a guide for action

Toddlers show high sensitivity to creator's intention when they interpret pictures. Previous research suggest that toddlers' performance can be facilitated in a picture comprehension task by making available the creator's intention that is, the social origin of picture-creation. The present study aims to test the generalizability of this facilitative effect in two very young age groups (24- and 26-month-olds). In order to test how toddlers generalize their knowledge, we introduced a treatment in which the creator was intentionally drawing objects and a completely different test context with a retrieval task. The results suggest that two-year-olds can transfer their socially mediated knowledge of pictures to a novel problem solving test situation and contextualize pictures that does not contain any social cues. Highlights We aimed to facilitate picture comprehension and to test the generalizability of this facilitative effect in two age groups. We introduced a treatment in which the creator was intentionally drawing and a different test context with a retrieval task. Two-year-olds can transfer their socially mediated knowledge of pictures to a novel problem solving test situation without any social cues.