Results
THE development of intersensory integrative competence with age in the whole sample of rural children is summarized in Tables VI and VII, and in Figures 3 and 4. The scores presented reflect diminution with age in the two types of errors which could be made in the course of judging whether the pairs of geometric forms, each member of which was presented to a different sensory system, were the same or different. The data presented in Table VI and Figure 3 represent changes with age in the ability to judge cross-modally presented identical forms as being the same. Since objectively equivalent forms were judged as being nonequivalent, such errors are referred to as errors of nonequivalence.
The data presented in Table VII and Figure 4 reflect errors that were made when objectively different forms were judged to be the same when presented across sensory modalities. Since objectively nonequivalent forms were in these instances judged to be equivalent, errors of this type are referred to as errors of equivalence.
As may be seen from these tables and figures, each of the pairs of intersensory relations improved with age and had the form [See Table VI in Source Pdf.] [See Table VII in Source Pdf.] of a logarithmic curve of growth. As was the case for the New York suburban school children studied by Birch and Lefford, the different pairings of sensory interrelations did not develop to the same degree or at the same rate. In the Guatemalan rural children, as in the New York children, visual-haptic integration was significantly more effectively organized at every age than were either visual-kinesthetic or haptic-kinesthetic integrative interrelationships.
