The Visual World of the Child

Eliane Vurpillot

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315454238
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psicología
• Categoria: Psicología del desarrollo

'How do children see the world?' is a question of immense importance which fascinates not only psychologists but also parents and all those concerned with education. In this English translation, first published in 1976, the author, who was Professor of Psychology at the René Descartes University in Paris, provided the most comprehensive review at the time of the development of visual perception in children, a field to which she herself had made a substantial contribution.

Her book, which gave the first comprehensive study of the relationship between cognitive development and perceptual activities in small children, explores how they interpret visual information and gradually build up a picture of the world. The author had devoted fifteen years to research on the visual world of the child and possessed an exhaustive knowledge of the experimental literature on the subject in English, French, Russian and other languages. She saw perception as a form of knowledge which the child exploits and adapts in a variety of ways at different stages of development. This is brilliantly demonstrated in her own research on the strategies children use in judging things as 'different' or 'the same' and the way these relate to the structure of their perceptual organisation.

This book is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in developmental and cognitive psychology; it also provides an object lesson in the application of experimental methods. In addition the organisation of the material made it a valuable textbook for advanced undergraduate and post-graduate teaching and will still be of interest in its historical context today.

PART ONE

The Role of Visual Structures in the Organisation of Spatial Relationships

Chapter 1

The Evolution of Perceptual Structures

Figure-ground discrimination can be demonstrated at birth (Kessen, 1967; Salapatek, 1968); the factor of uniform destiny appears to be operative at 5 weeks, and those of proximity and continuity somewhat later around the age of 6 months. Visual stimuli are therefore perceptually organised by the infant by the second half of the first year of life. Yet the primary perceptual structures which make up the visual world of children of 3 and 4 years of age, those which they operate and identify, appear to be rigid, indivisible, unanalysable and unarticulated.

For the child of 6 to 8 years the perceptual structures have lost much of their rigidity; the child of this age can break these structures down into parts, abstract certain of their characteristics and attend to one part whilst disregarding the others. Equally, different perceptual units can be combined, each one serving as a whole to the smaller units of which it is composed and, at the same time, as a component part of the comprehensive structure. It does not seem crucially important to us to decide whether there has been a transition from rigid primary perceptual structures, or whether the 7-year-old child can carry out intellectual operations involving perceptual structures which are the same at all age-levels, but which the 3-year-old child shows himself incapable of. It is a matter of theoretical preference, or perhaps the choice of words. To the present writer, who considers perception as a form of knowledge, the search for a precise boundary between what is perceptual and what is not is a pseudo-problem.

We are simply concerned to investigate how the child’s ability to act on his perceptual structures develops with age, and the effects of this evolution on the processes of identification and differentiation.

The purpose of the present chapter is to specify how the components of a line-figure drawing are organised in perceptual units; the extent to which children of 4–7 years of age can break them down into their components and reassemble them in new forms as in solving embedded-figures problems; to what degree they can link up isolated perceptual units by means of imaginary lines in order to identify the more complex structures of incomplete figures; and finally to see if they can pass rapidly from one structure to another when these are equipotential (reversible figures).

1 THE DISCRIMINATION OF EMBEDDED FIGURES

Those puzzle pictures in which you are asked to find a particular object from amongst the multitude of lines of a complicated drawing are a well-known example of the techniques of concealment. The difficulty of the puzzle is due to the fact that the object to be found coincides with none of the units in which the drawing as a whole is organised perceptually. In order to succeed it is therefore necessary to go beyond the objects spontaneously perceived, to disregard them as such and to consider the whole drawing as a mass of lines; this has then to be analysed and new groupings of the components attempted in order to create a structure identical to the model.

1 The nature of the problem

(a) Historical review. The technique of the discrimination of embedded figures would seem to be a good way of studying perceptual organisation, provided that non-representational figures are used and that the drawings are made up of a restricted number of lines so that their geometric relationships can be strictly controlled. In this way it is possible, by presenting different figures which have to be abstracted from the same complex line-drawing, first to verify the predictive value of Gestalt theories of organisation, and secondly to study the possibilities of perceptual structuring in terms of the physical properties of the stimuli and the developmental level of the subjects. If in fact the laws governing the organisation of figures are valid, they must make it possible to predict those structures into which the lines of a given complex figure will organise themselves; and any problem where the solution coincides with the discovery of one of these structures (as, for example, in problems of overlapping figures) should be solved rapidly and, furthermore, by the youngest children. Conversely, the discovery of a figure which does not coincide with one of these structures (as is the case in embedded-figures problems) should be impossible until a child’s developmental level permits him to act on his perceptual structures and, if not to modify them, at least to bypass them.

Numerous investigations have shown that the normal adult solves overlapping figures problems easily and rapidly. Presented with a complex geometric design and asked to describe it, all adults break it down into the same figures: the segregation into perceptual structures is thus the same for all, at least within the same culture. Only brain-damaged adults (Poppelreuter, 1917, 1923) fail to perceive the overlapping figures in a complex line-figure drawing.

Gottschaldt (1926) has shown that the repeated presentation of stimulus-patterns is insufficient to bring about their organisation into perceptual structures. The aim of this investigation was to demonstrate that associationism, as a theory, was unable to explain the phenomenon of perceptual organisation, whilst Gestalt theory accounted for it perfectly. The technique and, particularly, the material developed by this research-worker have been used many times since then, and the name of Gottschaldt is inextricably associated with embedded-figures problems; thus any account concerning the resolution of such problems must review briefly the original experiment.

A figure of type A (a hexagon, for example) is presented a certain number of times in one-second exposures, the subject having the task of memorising it. After several different line-figures have been presented in this fashion, a second series of line-figures (type B) is presented, each being exposed for two seconds, and the subject asked to describe them. The figures of type B have been constructed in such a way that one part of each of them is exactly identical to one of the figures of type A, but according to the laws of Gestalt theory, this part cannot constitute a perceptual unit (fig. 1). If the laws of associationism applied, the probability of perceiving a figure of type A amongst the lines of a figure of type B should be greater the more frequently A has been seen beforehand. However, even though a type A figure is included in each of the figures of type B, its presence is reported by an insignificant number of subjects – less than 10 per cent and this proportion remains the same, whether the type A figure has been presented three times or 520 times. Gottschaldt concluded from this that only the physical properties of the stimulus determine its organisation into figures. The components of a figure of type A present objective relationships of proximity, orientation and length which bring about the perception of a figure (a hexagon, in the example given). When the components of this hexagon are added to others in order to make up a new figure of type B, the relationships between the components of the hexagon are less salient than those which govern the new structure B, and it is these latter that determine which figures will be perceived in B. A number of experiments of the same kind, carried out by other workers, have basically substantiated and further refined Gottschaldt’s results (Djang, 1937; Hanawalt, 1942; Francès, 1963) whilst ascertaining more clearly the limits of their generalisation.

Fig. 1. Example of embedded-figure problem (Gottschaldt, 1926).

Gottschaldt’s research was concerned with the spontaneous perception of figures in a complex line-drawing. Other psychologists have subsequently used Gottschaldt’s original figures in order to study the plasticity of perception. When a figure of type A is presented side by side with the corresponding figure of type B and the subject is asked explicitly to find A in B, adults are rarely unsuccessful. The main variation is in the speed with which the task is accomplished, but in this respect individual differences are considerable and, in particular, women are consistently slower than men (Thurstone, 1944; Witkin, 1950; Andrieux, 1955).

(b) Predictions concerning perceptual organisation. Geometrically and conceptually speaking, a line is an infinite assembly of points which it is possible to consider separately; and the number of elements into which a line-drawing can be broken up is also infinite, as are the number of possible combinations between these elements. Perceptually, however, this is not the case since a line-drawing ‘organises itself’ into a limited number of perceptual structures. The Gestalt theorists predict that these structures, which we shall call primary structures, are essentially determined by the laws of ‘good’ continuity and ‘good’ form (closure, symmetry, internal equilibrium). It is possible to derive from these laws certain principles which enable us to predict into what primary structures any complex line-figure will be organised:

1 All the lines of a figure are involved in the construction of the primary contour structures (PCS).

2 No line or part of a line can belong to more than one primary structure. [The sum of the components which make up the primary contour structures is equal to the sum of the components which make up the figure in its entirety.]

3 A line belongs in its entirety to a single primary contour structure; [the different segments of which it is made up cannot be used in the composition of several primary contour structures].

4 The primary contour structures are preferably symmetrical or at least as regular as possible.

5 The number of primary contour structures must be the fewest possible.

The laws postulated by Wertheimer (1923) are concerned essentially with the lines of a figure, but the surface of the paper which these lines enclose is also undoubtedly involved in the perceptual organisation. Thus we must add one supplementary principle:

6 Each white area of paper entirely surrounded by the lines of a figure and not crossed by another line constitutes a primary area structure (PAS or MO).

In the embedded figures problems (Gottschaldt’s figures) the solution involves going beyond the primary structures to create secondary structures.

A secondary contour structure (SCS) is made up of lines, or segments of these, borrowed from one or several primary contour structures (fig. 2); the same line or the same segment of a line can belong at the same time to a primary structure and to one or several secondary structures.

A secondary area structure (SAS or AMO) is formed by the juxtaposition of several primary area structures (fig. 3).

From these formulations a fundamental difference is immediately apparent between secondary contour structures and secondary area structures. Whilst the secondary contour structures can only be made up of elements borrowed from several primary structures and depend therefore upon the preliminary dismemberment of these, the secondary area structures require no modifications of the corresponding primary structures, a simple addition being sufficient.

Complex line-figures can be divided into two groups, according to whether the relationships between the basic contour structures are those of overlap or juxtaposition (fig. 2).

In overlapping figures, the primary contour structures cut across each other at several points; the lines which make up these outlines continue, in the same direction, beyond the point of intersection. Furthermore, the area enclosed by one of these primary contour structures can only be a secondary area structure.

Fig. 2. Examples of the analysis of complex line-drawings (column 1), into primary (column 2), or secondary (column 3) contour structures (Vurpillot and Florès, 1946). In the top two rows of column 1 the figures are overlapping, in the bottom two rows they are juxtaposed.

In the case of juxtaposed figures, the primary contour structures only have points of contact and do not intersect. In particular instances one of them can constitute the outline of the complex figure, which puts it in a privileged position and tends to make it the frame of reference for the other components of the figure. This privileged, or reference, structure always encloses a secondary area structure, but in certain cases another primary contour structure can enclose a primary area structure.

Fig. 3. Examples of the analysis of juxtaposed figures into primary or secondary surface structures (Vurpillot and Florès, 1964).

(c) Hypotheses concerning the evolution of development. Following on from these distinctions between the different components which are involved in embedded-figures problems, one could expect that such a task should demonstrate clearly the rigidity of perceptual structures in children from 3 to 4 years.

The young child perceives in a complex line-drawing a group of figures, clearly individuated, which he cannot analyse. It is therefore easy for him to find in the line-drawing the figure identical to a given model when this is coincident with one of these primary perceptual structures (overlapping figures p...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Translator’s Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface to the French Edition
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part One The Role of Visual Structures in the Organisation of Spatial Relationships
• Part Two The Analysis of Visual Structures in Terms of their Properties
• Part Three Strategies of Exploration and Criteria of Judgment
• Bibliography
• Index