Genetic epistemologists, developmental psychologists and early childhood educators have long been concerned with the development of "symbolic,'"'abstract," or "formal logical" reasoning. In other words, how does a human learner develop the necessary strategies to cope with or adapt, to that which is not present in the environments? What are the structures needed and the processes necessary for the learner to develop the skills essential to understanding and knowing that the threedimensional present can be, and often is, represented in a less than actual manner such as by a photograph, a sketch, a picture, or even by a gesture? Aloreover, what is the essential relationship between the development of these abilities, which Irving E. Sigel calls representational competence (1968a, 196Sb), and future success within the learner's environments?
Sigel, currently of the State University of New York a t Buffalo, began the development of his distancing hypothesis as a result of inconsistencies observed during early (1953, 1954) studies and later research in cognitive styles among American lower-class children (Sigel, Anderson, & Shapiro, 1966;Sigel & McBane, 1967).
In his earlier study, Sigel came to the conclusion that the mode of representation did not significantly influence the classification abilities of lower-middle-class boys in tasks which demanded that the learner sort familiar items. I n these studies, the subjects were required to sort pictures, words, and three-dimensional objects, and the mode of representation was not statistically significant. He concluded that meaning transcended representation, and therefore when presented with a set of stimuli representing a familiar object, the mode of representation was irrelevant; that is, the learner was not confused by representational variations. This observed consistency was designated as representat,ional competence.
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In his later studies, with children from the lower-class, black population of Detroit, Michigan, Sigel noted unexplainable differences in similar sorting tasks. The children of this sample exhibited difficulty in classifying or grouping pictured objects according to commonality. Instead, this new sample of children tended to form classifications by chaining in thematic ways; for example, with objects X,Y, and Z, these children might place these three objects in one class, with object X related to Y, and Z would be placed into the class because of its relation to Y, but there would be no necessary or essential relation between X and Z as would be predicted for all objects placed in one category.
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