ABSTRACT
Piaget found that very young children often made no connection between the eye and the object, whilst older children often thought of vision as 'a passage from the eye to the object,.4 This 'passage' was studied by Guesne5 and by Andersson and Karrqvist.6 7 Guesne suggests that, whilst for luminous objects children might use a 'light corning to the eye', for non-luminous objects they use an 'active eye' model, although this latter model was used by only a minority of the students questioned. Andersson and Karrqvist, however, found what they called the 'visual ray idea' to be a common one. About 40 per cent of their sample of 12-and I5-year-olds used it in at least one of the three problem situations they were posed, although it was rarely used in a consistent way across the contexts.
