Anecdotes about primitive people who are unable to identify pictured objects suggest the hypothesis that pictorial recognition is a learned ability. In a weaker form of this hypothesis, learning might be held essential for the recognition of line drawings (compare Gibson’s ‘‘ghost shapes’’), while the native recognition of photographs, with their higher ‘‘fidelity,’’ would be admitted. The present investigation was designed to determine whether a child who had been taught his vocabulary solely by the use of objects, and who had received no instruction or training whatsoever concerning pictorial meaning or content, could recognize objects portrayed by two-dimensional line drawings and by photographs.