Means of communication and sources of information: Two-year-old children's use of pictures as symbols

People use pictures for many purposes, but two common functions are to communicate information to others and to extract new information. Previous research has demonstrated that 2-year-old children fail in using pictures as sources of information in search tasks (DeLoache & Burns, 1994). The purpose of this research was to investigate if children this age could, nonetheless, communicate via a picture the location of an object they have observed being hidden and, if so, whether experience with this function can facilitate using pictures as sources of information. Results show that children successfully used pictures to communicate information and that the symbolic awareness children gained with this task was rapidly transferred to one that required using pictures to extract information, task in which they otherwise fail.