RECOGNITION BY CHILDREN OF INVERTED PHOTOGRAPHS OF FACES1

Abstract

The present experiment is concerned with the question, Are young children superior to older children in recognizing spatially disoriented visual stimuli? This particular question and several related ones have received attention by psychologists (see 3, 16, for review of experiments), and, as a consequence of their research, apparently contradictory answers have been offered. Much of the early literature, poorly documented and heavily anecdotal, supports the generally accepted idea that children do recognize inverted pictures as easily as normally oriented ones (11, pp. 313-314; 14, p. 190; 15, PP. 70-71, 78). Although it was not common to test adults and children in the same experiment, apparently it was tacitly assumed that adults could not perform as well as children. For example, Newhall (13) concluded that stimulus recognition of 3to 5-year-old children was not affected by stimulus orientation. The stimuli in his experiment were very simple and differed greatly in form one from the other (chair, horse, boat, rabbit, child). Perhaps adults' performance would be identical with the children's in this situation; without comparison data from other age groups, any conclusion is unwarranted. Experimental evidence has been offered to support the rather vague claim that some adults do have difficulty when