Broad category membership guides visual attention in young children

Bria Long, Mariko Moher, Talia Konkle, George A. Alvarez, Susan Carey

By adulthood, our perceptual systems are sensitive to visual shape features that distinguish animate from inanimate entities (animacy) and big objects from small objects (real-world size) (Long et al., under review). How much experience is required for this sensitivity to develop? We conducted three visual search experiments where children touched a target picture among an array of distractor pictures on an iPad. Stimuli spanned a broad range of familiar basic-level categories and were controlled for average area, aspect ratio, contour variance, contrast, and luminance. Children (M=48.4mo) found animate targets faster among inanimate distractors than among animate distractors, and vice versa (t(9)=3.08, p=.01). Children (M=46.4mo) also found small object targets faster when distractors were big objects versus small objects, and vice versa (t(31)=2.52, p=.02). These results suggest that young children are sensitive to the perceptual features correlated with the broad dimensions of animacy and real-world object size. To explore whether similar results exist for any salient conceptual distinction, we asked if edibility (i.e., edible vs. non-edible objects) would influence visual search speeds, and found no differences in a group of 3- and 4-year-olds (t(14)=-1.35, p=.20) or when including 5- to 6-year-olds (t(26)=.02, p=.98). Though children can identify the animacy, real-world size, and edibility of individual entities by two years of age, only animacy and real-world object size influenced children’s visual search speeds. Our visual system may quickly generalize across basic level categories for these core dimensions, constructing perceptual feature representations for animacy and object size that guide visual attention.

Long, B., Moher, M., Konkle, T., Alvarez, G.A., & Carey, S. (2015). Broad category membership guides visual attention in young children. Poster presented at 5th Annual CEU Conference on Cognitive Development, January 8-11, Budapest, Hungary.