Investigates preschool children's ability to discriminate and categorize facial expressions. Four sets of drawings of faces depicted expressions of joy, sadness, surprise, and anger. Each set of drawings contained a "standard" face as well as five choices from which to select a match. (Author/RH)

Presents two studies which investigated the relative importance of various features in the discrimination of faces. (SDH)

Three experiments explored effects of stimulus and task factors on tendency to categorize according to taxonomic relations when those relations conflict with appearances. When provided with information that constrained categorization, preschoolers and adults reliably based their decisions on taxonomic relations between physically dissimilar items.…

This study was designed to determine whether modifying the task characteristics of the Stage 6 sensorimotor means-end problem (by introducing additional visual cues) aided task solution in children. Subjects were 80 children, ages 20-33 months. (CS)

The ability of 40 children four and five years of age to discriminate reflections and rotations of visual stimuli was examined in a kinetic imagery task. Results revealed that prediction accuracy was associated with the existence of orientation markers on the stimuli, as well as age, sex, type of discrimination, and several interactions among the…

In Experiment I, 24 preschoolers were tested on left-right, vertical-horizontal, and mirror-image oblique discriminations under essentially context-free conditions. Experiment II contrasted children's performance under context-free conditions with their ability to discriminate orientation in the presence of external visual cues. (RH)

Three experiments examined how flexibly two- to four-year-old children use the words "big" and "little" in normative, perceptual, and functional contexts. Results showed that children switched easily from a normative context but made errors when asked to switch to a normative context. (MDM)

It was concluded that drawing rules are essential and that adequate visual analysis is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite to the production of accurate copies. (Author)

Describes preschool children's ability to simultaneously perceive multiple aspects of an object in two experiments during which three- to five-year-olds were asked to describe part/whole pictures. (HOD)

The production and discrimination of eight basic facial expressions were investigated among 34 preschool children three to five years of age. Children's productions were elicited and videotaped under four different prompting conditions. Children's discrimination of drawings depicting facial expressions, sociometric ratings, and spontaneous…

Preschool children were asked to choose the figure most resembling a real man from three figures drawn according to formulas used by children to depict humans. Results suggest development of drawing systems influences children's conceptions about objects or events. (Author/DB)

Investigation indicates that perceptual inadequacy must be controlled in studies that utilize ambiguous, novel or nonsense designs in stimulus materials. (Authors)

Preschool, second-, and sixth-grade children performed developmentally gradated, easy and difficult visual discrimination tasks in a quiet room or with one of two levels of extraneous auditory stimulation. Subjects' errors, response latencies, and glances away from the task were recorded. (Author/RH)

Four-, five-, and six-year-old children were used as subjects in this investigation. There were 192 experimental and 96 control children used, divided equally between the three age groups. The experimental children received a 1-minute pretest exposure procedure in which 1/4 of the children observed 4 two-dimensional stimuli (irregular pentagons),…