Children's Responses to Visual Complexity in a Play Setting

Abstract

Groups of 4-yr.-old children were tested within a play environment containing Large climbing boxes which were structurally identical but presented two levels of visually patterned complexity. No preferences for either level of visual complexity were detected in the children's use of the boxes. This result confirmed predictions based on consideration of visual complexity as a form of unimodal complexity subordinate to multimodal complexity in an integral stimulus context represented by the play-setting tested.