A DEVELOPMENTAL STUDY ON SEGREGATION IN VISUAL PERCEPTION OF FIGURES

The purposes of this study were to investigate the characteristics of segregation by preschoolers and to examine how the visual perception of figure develops. Three groups of preschoolers (4 to 6 -year-old) and university students participated in three experiments. In Experiment 1, subjects were required to judge whether a certain part existed inside an overlapping geometric figure. The part with good continuity was easily detected by all age groups. In Experiment 2, subject were presented a geometric figure, where factor of closure and continuity were incompatible with each other. While some preshoolers attended to factor of closure, their responses had poor consistency across the conditions. In Experiment 3, preschoolers were required to trace a certain figure embedded in a complex figure. 3 age group-s were assigned to 2 conditions and their performances were recorded. It was suggested that preschoolers were poor at form analysis, memory, and integration of information. These results indicated that the segregation by preschoolers was less consistent across the conditions while more bound by the qualities of sti mulus