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The forest, the trees, and the leaves: Differences of processing across development.
Claire-Sara Krakowski1, Nicolas Poirel1, Julie Vidal1
1Department of Psychology, University of Paris Descartes.
Developmental Psychology
|July 26, 2016
Summary
Children
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Development
- Visual Perception
- Developmental Psychology
Background:
- Humans must filter visual information to focus on relevant tasks.
- Real-world visual data is structured hierarchically.
- Understanding attentional processing across development is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate visual salience at different hierarchical levels (local, intermediate, global) across childhood and adulthood.
- Examine attentional processing efficiency for hierarchical stimuli development.
- Explore the relationship between visual search and executive control development.
Main Methods:
- A feature visual search task with 3-level hierarchical stimuli was designed.
- 112 participants aged 5, 6, 9, and 21 years were tested.
- Salience (detection time) and processing efficiency (attentional cost) were measured.
Main Results:
- The global level was most salient at age 5; global and intermediate levels were salient in 9-year-olds and adults.
- The intermediate level was uniquely salient at age 6.
- All participants showed efficient processing for intermediate and global levels, but less efficient processing for the local level, indicating a local disadvantage.
Conclusions:
- Visual salience shifts from global to intermediate/global dominance during development.
- A consistent local processing disadvantage was observed across ages.
- Increased cognitive cost for local target selection in younger children suggests developmental changes in executive control impacting visual search.
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