Recently, there has been speculation as to how exposure to violence and sexuality on TV might elicit imitation of criminal acts in children, but little is known about how children come to understand TV. Young toddlers show some understanding of video by imitating it (14 mos.) and being reminded of past experiences by it (18 mos.). Despite these competencies, older children show difficulty understanding the exact nature of television. One task with which 2-year-olds have trouble is Troseth and DeLoache's (1998) video object-retrieval task (VO-R). According to Troseth and DeLoache, this difficulty stems from a lack of dual representational (DR) understanding with the medium of video. There is evidence that changing the representational demands of the VO- R may alter children's abilities to succeed. Three experiments will explore how changing the representational demands of the VO-R affects 2 year-olds' abilities to perform the task. In Exp.1, 24-month-olds will complete the VO-R in a familiar environment for which they already have a spatial mental representation. Eliminating the need to forth a new spatial representation is expected to allow younger children to pass the task. In Exp. 2, representational demands of the VO-R will be reduced by causing the video viewing experience to conform to children's expectations which should also allow 24-month-olds to succeed. Exp. 3 will introduce a new video-mediated tool use task to test DR understanding. It is hypothesized that this task will require different representational skills and provide a complement to the VO.R. Results of these experiments will contribute to our understanding of how representational competence in general and video image understanding in specific develop.
