| Abstract: | This study represents an extension of research on children's response to nonsense shapes varying in complexity to the tactual modality. Wooden cut-out shapes varying in number of turns from 3 to 40 were presented to children at Grades I, III, and VI, both for voluntary haptic exploration, and for preference choices. Both of these measures yielded monotonically increasing functions in the oldest group, while the youngest showed a similar but much flatter gradient for exploration times, and an inverted-U shaped preference function; data for the Third Grade subjects were in both cases intermediate. Supplementary data based on an analysis of preference choice latencies for stimulus pairs of adjacent levels of complexity, as well as on ratings of subject's mode of exploration of the stimuli under both response sets showed a marked shift from a predominantly passive to an increasingly active mode of exploration. These results are related to the age differences for the exploration-time and preference data, and discussed in relation to Schachtel's differentiation between allocentric and autocentric modes of perception. |
