Mental representations and understanding what other people can see

Your child uses their senses to understand the world around them. Processing information from their senses has helped them to form ‘mental representations’ of familiar objects. This means that they can think about an object and also think about parts of the object that they cannot see.   

Your child’s mental representations help them to think about what other people can see too. You might notice your child understands this when they turn a picture round to show it to you.  

There are different ideas about how our mental representations develop.  

Some scientists believe representations are formed by thinking about what we see repeatedly as a viewer. When we see an object again and again, and from different angles, we store multiple representations of that object – a bit like our brain taking lots of snapshots of something to form our understanding of it - which can then be used to recognise it when we see it again.  

This is known as viewer-centred representation.  

Others believe representations are formed by thinking about the entire object, so we have one complete representation (or mental image) we use to recognise it, regardless of the distance and angle from which it’s viewed.  

This is known as object-centred representation.  

Recent research suggests that viewer-centred is the more likely explanation of our mental representation of objects.  

Either way, your child needs lots of opportunities to look at, move and handle objects so they can form mental representations which will help them to understand the world around them (and everything that’s in it).  

Reference: 

Sternberg, R. & Sternberg, K. (2016). Cognitive Psychology (7th edn.). Cengage learning.