This experiment attempts to determine developmental trends in object recognition. Two object identification questionnaires were administered to 26 children between the ages of 4 and 10. One questionnaire included pictures fragmented arbitrarily, whereas the other included pictures fragmented according to recognition-by-components (RBC) theory (Biederman, 1987). Factors related to performance on the questionnaires were measured using the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (Brown, Sherbenou, & Johnson, 1990) and the Figure-Ground, Form Constancy, Closure, and Spatial Relations subtests of the Developmental Test of Visual Perception (DTVP; Hammill, Pearson, & Voress, 1993). There was a significant increase in the number of correctly identified objects with age for the arbitrarily fragmented objects, but not for the RBC objects. This findings suggests that the RBC objects contained sufficient information for identification across ages. In addition, different factors appear to influence recognition between the two types of objects. Arbitrarily fragmented objects are related to visual closure ability whereas RBC objects are related to the total of the four DTVP-2 subtests. These findings suggest that recognizing arbitrarily fragmented objects may be influenced by a specific perceptual ability but the RBC objects may be influenced by a number of related abilities.

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