This study investigated attention to and recognition of components in compound stimuli among infants and preschoolers. Oddity tasks with preschoolers and familiarization/novelty-preference tasks with infants demonstrated successful discrimination among stimuli components on basis of edge property information. Matching tasks with preschoolers and habituation tasks with infants demonstrated they were able to direct attention to and recognize components of compound stimuli. Findings pose implications for structural-description theories of object recognition. (Author/KB)