Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When children encounter objects, design constrains and affords action and cognition. An observational study in the wild revealed how manipulable objects afforded greater complexity of cognitive outcomes, including testing causeand- effect and expressing abstract ideas about phenomena in the natural world. Evidence comes from video analysis of children’s speech, gesture, and action when using a wide range of natural history exhibits. In the museum—an environment expressly designed for learning—children sought information with their moving bodies, eyes and hands. They explored sensorimotor contingencies, looking while touching, pushing, and pulling; they probed the perceptual affordances of different types of museum media, including graphic panels, specimens, models, and interactive exhibits. Children spoke more about the museum’s content when they touched the exhibits, but the content of their speech changed depending on the object’s affordances for interaction. With static specimens and models, children most often referred to objects’ concrete properties. With interactive exhibits, children’s speech involved references to dynamic relations among exhibit elements. Use of abstract speech and iconic gestures also suggests that they perceived interactive exhibits as representations of objects and phenomena beyond the hereand- now. In summary, when children used interactive exhibits, the content of their speech was relational, representational, and at times, both representational and relational; they employed modes of conceptualization not seen when using non-interactive exhibits.