ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with perceptual inferences which the child makes about orientation. Some of the most striking evidence about the way children compare and discriminate orientation has been provoked by the well-known attentional theory put forward by E. J. Gibson. The systematic evidence about young children's ability to learn discriminations between obliques and between horizontal and vertical lines came from a now well-known experiment which R. G. Rudel and H. L. Teuber carried out with children aged between three and a half and eight and a half years. Many people have thought that young children are particularly prone to confuse figures which are mirror-images of each other. Like Ernst Mach, S. T. Orton argues that the child only has a basis for telling symmetrical figures apart when he has developed some internal asymmetry of his own. Mach and Orton were concerned mainly with confusions between letters and words, but their ideas are also directly relevant to obliques.
