Does Children’s Scale Error Relate to a Failure to Detect Size Change?

Abstract

The scale error is a phenomenon in which young children try to perform impossible actions on miniature versions of objects. Previous work (Grzyb et al., 2017) indicates that children's errors in the scale error task were associated with a failure to notice object size changes in a 2D looking time task. Here we extend this work to a more naturalistic environment, asking whether failure to detect size changes can be observed in the scale error task itself. Results revealed that the duration of children's object exploration differed when the objects' size changed from childsized to miniature-sized. In particular, children who produced scale errors decreased contact time with the miniature sized objects more rapidly than those who did not. These results therefore offer the first evidence from an ecologically valid task that that scale errors may arise from a failure to detect changes in object size.