Form and Its Orientation: A Child's-Eye View

Abstract

The orientation of pictorial material usually is determined by the position of the figure with respect to a frame of reference provided by the environment or by the observer. The figure is considered right side up, or correctly oriented, when it is in the usual or familiar position with reference to the frame. Nonrealistic, or geometric, figures are not, however, usually considered to have a 'right side up' orientation (except in certain esthetic judgments). Some chance observations indicated that young children show preferences for the orientation of geometric forms, i.e. they consider certain nonrepresentational forms to be right side up in one orientation and upside down in another. Such a finding would be surprising in any age-group, but it is particularly unexpected in preschool children in view of the customary belief that young children are unresponsive to the orientation of forms. This report describes a systematic investigation of these curious preferences for orientation and discusses the implicatons of the results for the more general problem of the influence of orientation on the child's perception of form. EXPERIMENT I Children of various ages were tested to determine the consistency of preference at different ages, and various types of form were used in an attempt to analyze the aspects of the stimulus that determined preference. Subjects. The Ss were 78 children between the ages of 4-8 yr. There were 22 aged 4 yr., 26 aged 5 yr., 14 aged 6 yr., and 16 aged 7-8 yr., with approximately the same number of boys and girls in each group. The children were enrolled in a child care center situated in a low-income area in New York.1 Procedure. Twenty-six pairs of pictures were presented to each child, and he was asked to point to the one that was upside down or wrong. The members of each