Related article: knees and lowered themselves onto it. Some simply perched on top, others sat down so hard that the chair skittered out from under them. Some children sat on the miniature slide and tried to ride down Almond Cucumber Peel-Off Mask it, usually falling off in the process; others attempted to climb the steps, causing the slide to tip over. (With the chair and slide made of sturdy plastic and only about five inches tall, the toddlers faced no danger of hurting themselves.) A few kids tried to get into the tiny car. Just as they had done with the large version, they opened the door and attempted--often with remarkable persistence--to force a foot inside. One little girl went so far as to take off her shoe in the apparent hope that her foot would then fit! Interestingly, most of the children showed little or no reaction to their failed attempts with the miniatures. A couple seemed a bit angry, a few looked sheepish, but most simply went on to do something else. We think the lack of reaction probably reflects the fact that toddlers' daily lives are full of unsuccessful attempts to do one thing or another. Our interpretation is that scale errors originate in a dissociation between the use of visual information for planning an action and for controlling its execution. When a child sees a miniature of a familiar object, visual information--the object's shape, color, texture and so on--activates the child's mental representation of its referent. Associated with that memory is the motor program for interacting with the large object and other similar objects. In half the children we studied, this motor program was presumably activated but then inhibited, and the children did not attempt to interact with the miniature in the same way as they did with the large version. But in the other half the motor routine was not inhibited. Once the child began to carry out the typical motor sequence, visual information about the actual size of the object was used to accurately perform the actions. Some children, for instance, bent over the tiny chair and looked between their legs to precisely locate it; those trying to get into the miniature car first opened its door and then tried to shove their foot right in. In deciding to interact with the replica, the children relied on visual information linking it to the normal-size object, but in executing their plan, they used visual information about the miniature's actual size to guide their actions. This dissociation in the use of visual information is consistent with influential theories of visual processing--ones positing that different regions of the brain handle object recognition and planning versus the execution and control of actions. Scale errors involve a failure of dual representation: children cannot maintain the distinction between a symbol and its referent. We know this because the confusion between referent and symbolic object does not happen when the demand for dual representation is eliminated--a discovery I made in 1997 when Rosengren and Kevin F. Miller of the University of Illinois and I convinced two-and-a-half-year-olds--with the full consent of their parents, of course--that we had a device that could miniaturize everyday objects. The Magical Machine Using our amazing shrinking machine, we hoped to see if the need to think of an object in two ways at once was at the heart of young children's inability to appreciate symbols. If a child believes that a machine has shrunk an object or a room, then in the child's mind the miniature is the thing itself. There is no symbolic relation between room and model, so children should be able to apply what they know about the big version to the little one. We used the powers of our device to turn toys into miniature versions of themselves and to shrink a large tent. In front of the child, we placed a toy--a troll doll with vivid purple hair--in a tent and aimed the shrinking machine at the tent. The child and experimenter then decamped to another room to wait while the machine did its work. When they returned to the lab, a small tent sat where the big one had been. (One of the remarkable things about this study is the fact that the children did not find it at all surprising that a machine could miniaturize objects. Or that it might need privacy to do so.) When we asked the children to search for the toy, they immediately