Studies in Perceptual Development: II. Part-Whole Perception

Hierarchical forms processing in adults and children

“…These early studies frequently contained hierarchical visual stimuli composed of common objects-for example, representations of houses or people composed from arrangements of vegetables-to assess whether children would focus on parts or wholes in the interpretation of complex scenes. Underlying these studies was the assumption that young children, having more limited perception, would be able to attend to either only the whole, without analysis of the constituent parts (Gibson, 1969;Werner, 1965; see Vurpillot, 1976, for a review), or only the parts, without a comprehensive picture of the whole (Carey & Diamond, 1977;Elkind, Koegler, & Go, 1964).…”

Learning Disabilities: A Developmental Approach

“…Programs of remediation must also consider the dynamics, for instance, the &dquo;snowballing effect&dquo; of consistent, everyday teaching and a child's sense of success. Elkind and Scott (1962), related to figure-ground reversal, studies by Elkind, Koegler and Go (1964), related to part-whole integration, studies by Elkind and Weiss (1967), related to exploration, have all shown that children tend to center upon dominant features of the field and that this centration diminishes with increasing age. When further studies were undertaken to determine if these factors were related to learning to read, the results were consistent in showing a strong, positive relationship between performance on the measures of perceptual decentration and reading.…”

The Development of Global and Local Processing: A Comparison of Children to Adults

“…The question of the relative strength of global versus local processing reflects a long history in both child and adult global-local research (e.g., Elkind et al, 1964;Navon, 1977). ''Global precedence'' refers to the commonly observed dominance of global processing reflected in the combination of greater global advantage (faster RTs for global relative to local identification) and global interference (an asymmetry of interference such that inconsistency at the global level disrupts local identification to a greater extent than inconsistency at the local level disrupts global processing).…”