We are the symbolic species. There's really nothing that distinguishes us more from other creatures than our very flexible, creative use of different kinds of symbols and it's also what underlies our enormous cognitive power, because we're not limited to just learning about the world through direct experience with the world. We can learn about it through what somebody else tells us, through pictures, through maps, through videos, through a whole host of different kinds of symbolic representations. So what we know is just hugely expanded by the fact that we can use different kinds of symbols, so this is clearly a very important aspect of the development of any human child.
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