Development of scene knowledge: Evidence from explicit and implicit scene knowledge measures

In our daily lives, we rely on expectations of where to find objects in a scene. Every morning without conscious reflection, we find the milk in the refrigerator. How do these schemata develop during childhood? In the current study, we investigated the behavioral responses of 72 2- to 4-year-olds in two tasks that measured scene knowledge either directly by asking them to furnish a dollhouse or indirectly by observing their eye movements in a violation paradigm using scene photographs. In addition, we collected language acquisition measures for each child to investigate possible relations between the development of scene knowledge and language abilities. Results for both explicit and implicit measures indicated an increase of performance with age in terms of correct object placement relative to corresponding rooms/locations and a difference in first-pass dwell times between consistent and inconsistent objects. The consistency effect in eye movements was associated with shorter processing times for consistent objects, reflecting stronger predictions for objects in their familiar context/location. A reduction of first-pass dwell times to consistent objects was also predicted by the dollhouse performance measure of scene knowledge. Although strong links to language development could not be found, first indications are discussed together with possible improvements of future studies investigating such a link. In sum, our results imply that scene-related predictions effectively can influence implicit and explicit behavior by 4 years of age at the latest, allowing optimized attention allocation in scenes.