Scanning for reversed and rotated targets

Children and adults scanned arrays of identical shapes for mirror reversed or 180° rotated targets. The decomposition of scanning time into ‘target identification time’ and ‘context scanning time’ indicated that it takes longer to identify reversed than rotated targets but that it takes equally long in both conditions to scan context. This confirms the notion of a specific difficulty in coding mirror reversed shapes.When the shapes used contained vertical lines, ‘scanning time’ increased while ‘target identification time’ was unaffected. This is probably due to a tendency to fixate lines at right angles to the direction of scan and does not reflect a coding difficulty.