The research was designed to empirically describe the relative development of perceptual and conceptual understanding of projective relationships between objects and to elucidate a heuristic model of the cognitive processes involved in coordination of perspectives tasks. Three experiments were run. The results of the first two indicated that the ability to relate perceptually and conceptually left-right and back-front relationships simultaneously, emerges between the ages of 4'/2 and 5 3 /4 years, but by age 5 3 /4 perception is more advanced than conception. On tasks emphasizing perceptual understanding, performance approached asymptote at about age 9, but for tasks emphasizing conceptual understanding, performance was well below asymptote at age 12. In addition, on the latter tasks, the greatest performance increases occurred between the ages of 9 to 11, suggesting that a developmental shift occurs during that age range. The results of all three experiments were consistent with a model which identifies "extraction" of spatial relationships from the stimulus array and from the choice stimuli and "comparison" and "matching" of the images derived from extraction as the fundamental processes involved in both the perceptual and conceptual aspects of coordination of perspectives.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract