From Mind to Picture: A Systematic Review on Children’s and Adolescents’ Understanding of the Link between Artists and Pictures

From early in their lives, children begin to understand and use a large array of symbols to convey information about objects, events and ideas. A symbol is something that a person uses with the intention to denote something other than itself. A key element of this definition is the human intention to represent one entity with another (Allen & Armitage, 2017; DeLoache, 2004; Freeman, 1995, 2008). Consequently, to become symbol users, children and adolescents must go beyond the perceptual and cognitive abilities that enable them to interact with the physical world and develop the ability to infer and to adopt the mental states of others (Tomasello, 1999).