Global-local processing in preschool children

The tendency of young children to attend to global and/or local levels of hierarchically structured patterns was examined using an orientation judgment task. 3- and 4-year-old children and adults were asked to judge which way an equilateral triangle was pointing under different contextual conditions. In Experiment 1, contextual variations included overall pattern orientation, configuration alignment type, presence or absence of an immediate frame of reference, and type of local element context. The results showed that, contrary to previous reports in the literature, young children, like adults, attend to both global and local levels of a pattern. Both pattern orientation and the introduction of contextual cues affected children's judgments, and the magnitude of that effect varied with the particular contextual cue present in the stimulus array. In Experiment 2, contextual variations included overall pattern orientation and presence or absence of an internal local level element. Consistent with the results of Experiment 1, young children's orientation judgements were influenced by the addition of local level factors.