In an evaluation of the relation between dimensional salience and preschoolers' judgments of bigness, 3-year-old children were shown triads of rectangles and asked to select the "big" one. The biggest rectangle in each triad was neither the tallest nor the widest. (JMB)

As children grow older they show an increasing preference for classifying objects on the basis of shape rather than color. To clarify the nature of this "dimension preference," children of ages 3 1/2 to 6 1/2 years were given a method of triads test of dimension preferences, followed (after a week's delay) by a component selection task. The most…

Purposes of this study are to determine the effects of (1) preassessed dimensional salience upon performance in a bi-dimensional matching task, and (2) pretraining conditions expected to facilitate bi-dimensional processing. An additional aim was to elucidate a model of development involving changing salience hierarchies by comparing the effects…