Form and Its Orientation: Reexamination of a Child's-Eye View

Abstract

One hundred twenty kindergarten, second-, and fourth-grade children viewed bilaterally symmetrical geometric forms through a circular window on a turntable and were asked to make them right side up or upside down. The greatest number of nonvertical orientations were made for forms that resembled horizontally oriented English letters. Upside-down judgments were not the empirical converse of right-side-up judgments. The results are compared with those from an earlier study by Braine. Lila Ghent Braine (Ghent, 1961) has described two studies of children's judgments of the orientations of certain geometric forms (which she called nonrealistic forms). The forms employed in her first study, and the only forms with which we were concerned in this work, are reproduced in the left column of Table 1, with the exception of an equilateral triangle. Her subjects ranged in age from four to eight years. The agreement among subjects was striking: for the four-year-olds, agreement of judgment of 'upside down' was greater than chance for 11 of the 16 forms. Indeed, for 6 of these forms the percent agreement was 95%. The older children's judgments agreed strongly for fewer forms and reversed in judgment for 2-forms 1 and 11. Braine saw the most important problem raised by these findings to be that of defining the characteristics of the cards selected as upside down. Using responses of her younger subjects as the basis for her analysis, she suggested that a form was judged upside down when the focal portion was in the lower half of the card. Braine tentatively assumed that figures eliciting significant concordance of judgment had one portion that caught the 'attention,' or drew the eye, more readily than did other portions. The angle