THE ROLE OF TYPICAL CONTOURS IN OBJECT PROCESSING BY CHILDREN

Draughtsmen depicting objects often do so by means of outlines derived in a systematic manner from the objects' surfaces. These outlines rep resent those points on a solid's surface where the surface appears to change rapidly; a line joining these points of maximum change is here termed a typical contour. Previous research (Dziurawiec & Deregowski, 1992) has shown that children's distorted drawings of animal models ma y be explained by the child's tendency to depict typical contours for different regions of an object, e.g. head, trunk, tail, and bring thes e together in a single drawing. The present paper extends this researc h to the role of typical contours in the discrimination and recognitio n of unfamiliar solids. In Expt 1 results collected from 108 nursery s chool children indicate that learning to discriminate between unfamili ar models is significantly improved when the models' typical contours are presented in the participants' fronto-parallel plane. In Expt 2 da ta collected from a further 107 nursery school children established th at when all views of an unfamiliar object are available, nursery schoo l children readily abstract the typical contours and use them as an ai d to subsequent recognition. The utility of the typical contours appro ach, previously demonstrated for object depiction, is confirmed for ob ject recognition.