Four-year-old marta drew a picture with pretty lavender, purple, and blue colors intermixed with green, yellow, and brown. "it’s a boat on the ocean at sunset, with whales jumping all around it! " she explained to her teacher. marta is showing clear evidence of being in the substage of piaget’s preoperational stage.

Symbolic function.

Explanation:

Jean Piaget developed a theory about cognitive development in children and teenagers. This theory is made by different stages.

The second of this stages is the preoperational stage and it takes place from ages 2 to 7, approximately.

One of the substages of Piaget's preoperational stage is the symbolic function which refers to the child's ability to use symbols to represent or stand for perceived objects and events.

In this example Marta drew a picture with lavender, purple and blue colors mixed with green, yellow and brown. She said it was a boat on the ocean at sunset with whales jumping all around it. Clearly, Marta is using symbols and colors in her drawings to represents objects and events she knows in real life.

Thus this is an example of the symbolic function.