UNDERSTANDING ASPECTS OF PICTURES - THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCENE SCHEMATAIN YOUNG-CHILDREN

The focus of this research was on preschool children's understanding o f information depicted in pictures. Children were presented tasks asse ssing their understanding of object likelihoods, object positions, obj ect sizes, and depth in scenes. The results indicated that knowledge a bout object likelihoods and positions show parallel patterns of develo pment and share significant common variation, suggesting that they are early-developing aspects of scene schemata. Knowledge about size and depth seem to develop more slowly and were related to knowledge about object likelihoods only for older preschool children. Size and depth d o not appear to form part of the scene schemata of young children.