The current study examined preschool children’s perception
and satisfaction with their body size using the silhouette method.
We added three training phases to this method to ensure that the
children understood the concepts being measured. First, we found
that the proportion of correct answers that were obtained without
help exceeded the odds for all tasks. Although these findings cannot
fully support the contention that children of this age have the
cognitive capacity to correctly identify or estimate their body size,
they strongly suggest that cognitive skills’ training is appropriate
during this period of development. We found that most children
succeed in different training tasks, even when excluding the possibility
of (correct) random responding. As the children could easily
identify the size of the animal stimulus, we may assume that inaccuracies
in self-identification might be explained by factors other
than limited cognitive abilities. This observation has been made in
previous work by Lerner and Gellert (1969) who found that 5-yearold
participants who failed to accurately assess their own body
were still able to correctly identify the body size of other children.
Work by White, Mauro, and Spindler (1985) support these
findings. They found that children were able to match other children
of different weights (body type). However, as we did not use
these authors’ strategies and noting that our animal stimulus task
is a simple matching task that might be less complex than asking the child to identify the representation of his or her own body, we
remain cautious about how these findings demonstrate a presence
of the cognitive skills necessary for self-identification at this stage
of development.