Confirmation was obtained that the phenomena of figure obscured by random noise and embedded figures form a triangular, planar continuum. 80 preschoolers, third- and sixth-graders, and college students searched for and recognized a nonrepresentational figure obscured to different degrees by noise that varied from random and unrelated to the contours of the figure to highly embedding contexts. Response time varied directly with the amount of noise and with embeddedness, and inversely with age, producing analogous response planes along the age dimension.
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