| Abstract: | This investigation extends the study of children's response to stimulus complexity to meaningful pictorial material. The primary purpose was to compare the functions relating complexity to two different response variables: voluntary looking time vs. preference, considered as measures of an information-extraction as opposed to an aesthetic mode of response, respectively. A further interest was in possible age differences in each of these functions. The 192 subjects taken from Grades 1 to 8 were presented with two sets of stimuli: one taken from scenes of the physical environment scaled for diversity, the other representing constellations of postage stamps, varying from all identical to all different.In the case of the Environment set, the results gave support to the hypothesis that the two response measures relate differentially to diversity, with looking times increasing monotonically with diversity, whereas preference peaked in the middle of the diversity scale, falling off irregularly to either side; for the Stamp set the difference between the two functions emerged in attenuated form. Age differences for these functions were relatively slight, for the most part. The results are discussed in relation to theories (e.g., Dember and Earl's) postulating increases with experience in preference for complexity. |
