Prof. Judy Deloache is the William R. Kennan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at UVA. Prior to moving to Charlottesville in 2000, she taught at the University of Illinois, where she also obtained her Ph.D. She is author of Current Readings in Child Development 1st-3rd editions, How Children Develop, A World of Babies: Imagined Child Care Manuals from Other Cultures and numerous articles in developmental psychology. She has assumed various leadership positions in her field, and currently she serves on the editorial board for Science magazine.
Her primary area of research, conducted in the Child Study Center she heads at UVA, is early cognitive development, especially the development of symbolic functioning. Mastery of the various symbols and symbol systems used for communication are important to development. Her research has focused on the origins of children’s understanding of symbolic artifacts, such as pictures, models, and replica objects. She has proposed that the exploitation of symbolic objects requires dual representation: One must perceive and mentally represent both the object itself and, at the same time, one must represent the relation between the object and what it stands for. Achieving dual representation is a formidable challenge for very young children. Symbol-referent relations that seem simple and obvious to adults are neither simple nor obvious to young children, in large part because they focus too much on the object itself to the neglect of its relation to its referent.
Current work also focuses on scale errors made by toddlers — they try to treat a miniature, replica object as if it were its larger counterpart. For example, they attempt to sit on tiny chairs and get their feet into toy cars. The difference in scale between the child’s own body and the target object is so great that one cannot watch the effort without amusement and amazement.
Judy Deloache’s Homepage
