ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses only a small fragment of the available material relating to infant form perception. It considers only the infant’s ability to see the forms of rigid objects which are three-dimensional, either in the sense that they are solid, or in the sense that they are planar and oriented out of the fronto-parallel. That is to say, the following discussion is concerned with what is often described as the problem of infant “shape constancy.” While consideration is given to certain questions relating to the infant’s visual organization of form, no attempt is made to review or discuss the relatively large body of infant shape-perception literature which concerns the perception of flat patterns, and no attempt is made attempt to provide a developmental account of infant shape-constancy. The following discussion, and the research presented here, is concerned simply with providing a descriptive account of the young infant’s ability to see the spatial structure of a rigid object.
