What's Up? The Development of an Orientation Preference for Picture Books

The very strong, natural-seeming preference that adults and older children have for looking at pictures in their canonical orientation is not shared by very young children. In 3 studies with 18- to 30-month-old children, several different assessments were made of the degree to which the children behaved differentially to upright versus inverted picture books. The 18-month-olds in these studies did not exhibit a strong orientation preference: They usually (a) looked at a picture book that was handed to them upside down without reorienting it, (b) did not acknowledge or protest when an adult read to them while holding a book upside down, and (c) selected randomly between upright and inverted picture books. In addition, they were equally accurate at identifying depicted objects in upside-down and right-side-up pictures. In contrast, a group of 30-month-olds consistently preferred to interact with canonically oriented picture books. The 24-month-old participants generally behaved like the 18-month-olds, but gave more evidence of a preference. We suggest that these age differences in orientation preference may have to do with both conceptual and perceptual factors. The results, thus, contribute to the growing evidence that the development of pictorial competence is complex and multifaceted.