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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 25, 2026

Three-Dimensional Shape Modeling and Analysis of Brain Structures

Three-Dimensional Shape Modeling and Analysis of Brain Structures

Published on: November 14, 2019

Emergence of global shape processing continues through adolescence.

K Suzanne Scherf¹, Marlene Behrmann, Ruth Kimchi

¹Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. suzyscherf@cmu.edu

Child Development

|February 25, 2009

Summary

Perceptual organization, crucial for object recognition, develops late into adolescence. Children and adolescents show a local bias, while global shape encoding improves with age.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Developmental Psychology
Neuroscience

Background:

The developmental trajectory of perceptual organization in humans remains largely unclear.
Understanding how individuals perceive and organize visual information is fundamental to cognitive development.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate perceptual grouping abilities across a wide age range (8-30 years).
To determine the developmental timeline of global versus local processing in visual perception.

Main Methods:

Utilized a classic compound letter global/local (GL) task.
Employed a microgenetic prime paradigm (MPP) with few- and many-element hierarchical displays.

Main Results:

Children and adolescents displayed a local bias in the GL task, unlike adults.
All age groups favored individuating few-element displays in the MPP.
The ability to encode global shape from many-element displays at short durations improved with age.

Conclusions:

The complete process of deriving shape information from perceptual grouping develops late into adolescence.
This late development impacts the efficiency of object recognition and identification.
Findings highlight a prolonged developmental period for sophisticated visual processing.