Near and far transfer of stepwise cognitive training of visuoperceptual organization abilities in children

Considering that the early school year are critical for the development of visuoperceptual organization skills, we investigated the effect of stepwise training in perceptual strategies using drawing-based materials on children's perceptual and constructional performance. Forty-four children (24 girls), aged 6.5 to 9 years (M = 7.34; SD = 0.64), were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control group (N = 22 per group). All participants completed the Bender Visual- Motor Gestalt Test - II (a graphomotor test of perceptual organization) and the Block Design test (a measure of constructional ability) before and after the training. The experimental group received the stepwise training on copying of the Rey- Osterrieth Complex Figure, while the control group received drawing materials without any instructions. The study employed a 2 (Group: Experimental, Control; between-subject) × 2 (Phase: Pretest, Posttest; within-subject) design. After controlling for the pretest scores, results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group on both tasks. No effects of age or gender were detected. We suggest that perceptual organization and planning skills promoted by our training contributed to the enhanced performance. Given the varying degree of similarity between each task and the training materials, we proposed that both near and far transfer of skills acquired through visuoperceptual organization training can occur in children.