SPATIAL CODING AND OBLIQUE DISCRIMINATION BY CHILDREN

Children from five to eight years of age learned to discriminate between mirrorimage oblique lines more readily when cards bearing the obliques were presented vertically than when they were presented horizontally. The difference in performance between the vertical and horizontal planes could not be accounted for by differences in either the external visual context or the availability of asymmetrical body information (e.g., left vs right hand). The superiority of the vertical plane was attributed to the congruence of objective, bodily, and retinal vertical axes for the vertical, but not the horizontal plane, It was concluded, on this basis, that at least part of children's difficulty discriminating between mirror-image obliques is due to their difficulty establishing the internalized vertical axis necessary for the left-right spatial coding of the obliques. © 1979.