2017 Volume 28 Issue 2 Pages 74-83
This study investigated the ages at which children can reverse ambiguous figures without any suggestion of another interpretation. When children cannot reverse the figures, we also considered whether or not they reverse them more easily after having observed the process of disassembling a figure (e.g., perceived as a rabbit) into pieces and then reassembling the pieces into the exactly same composition as previously presented, but with the pretext that the figure would be different (e.g., a duck). The results showed that a majority of 5-year-old children easily succeed in making alternative interpretations, whereas 3-year-olds stick to their first interpretations and cannot find another one. We found that the de- and re-construction procedure facilitates the spontaneous reversal of ambiguous figures only for 5-year-old children, whereas there was no such effect for 3- to 4- year-olds. Our findings suggest that it is not until age 5 that children come to understand the representational nature of interpretations of ambiguous figures.
