ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the early development of symbolic understanding and use with this definition of a symbol. Representation is sometimes used as the superordinate category to which symbols belong. Mandler also distinguished between broad and narrow senses of representation. the most influential efforts to chart the representational landscape, the philosopher Charles S. Peirce proposed three categories of sign relations: icon, index, and symbol. According to archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, the ancient Sumerians, around 8500 bc, started keeping track of agricultural trades with small tokens fashioned out of clay. The archaeological account provides a wonderful illustration of the difficulty inherent in the dual nature of symbolic artifacts. The complexity of symbolic understanding stems in large part from a variety of factors that make it more or less difficult to achieve dual representation. Bloom and Markson provided another example of young children using intention to judge pictures.
