Developmental change in children's analysis of spatial patterns.

This study examines the early development of spatial pattern analysis and focuses on changes in the way that preschool children segment and integrate the parts of simple spatial forms. The results from each of the three experiments in this study show that young children analyze spatial patterns in ways that differ systematically from that of older children and adults. Changes with development were observed in the parts children segmented out of the forms and in the relations they used to organize the parts forming the overall pattern. The youngest children segmented out simple, well-formed, spatially independent parts and used simple relational structures to bind these parts together. With development, children constructed forms that included increasingly complex parts and relations. These findings were consistent across several different stimuli using two construction mediums. In this study, we examined the early development of children's analysis of spatial patterns. We focused on the systematic patterns of change in the way that young children approach the problem of analyzing simple spatial forms and traced these patterns of change across the preschool period. In each experiment, we explored the nature of analytic processing in the young child and examined changes in the way that young children parse a spatial pattern into its constituent parts (segmentation) and synthesize those parts into a coherent whole (integration). This definition of analysis is consistent with other studies of analytic processing reported in the child (e.g., Elkind, 1969; Gibson, 1969; Kemler, 1983a; Werner, 1948) and adult literature (e.g., Garner, 1976; Pomerantz, Sager, & Stoever, 1977; Shepp, 1983), but states more precisely the functions that constitute the analytic process. It thus specifies in greater detail the ways in which children's analysis changes with development. Current theories of perception are generally in agreement that adults first encode features in the visual field prior to recognizing those features as patterns or objects (e.g., Julesz, 1984; Marr, 1982; Treisman & Gormican, 1988). However, there has not been similar agreement in the developmental literature. Historically in development, issues of segmentation and inte