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Exploring the perceptual spaces of faces, cars and birds in children and adults
Author(s) -
Tanaka James W.,
Meixner Tamara L.,
Kantner Justin
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.01023.x
Subject(s) - psychology , perception , face (sociological concept) , space (punctuation) , similarity (geometry) , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , visual perception , face perception , artificial intelligence , sociology , image (mathematics) , computer science , operating system , social science , neuroscience
While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child‐friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 9–10, 11–12 and adults were presented with 50/50 morphs of typical and atypical face, bird and car parent images. Participants were asked to judge whether the 50/50 morph more strongly resembled the typical or the atypical parent image. Young and older children and adults showed a systematic bias to the atypical faces and birds, but no bias toward the atypical cars. Collectively, these findings argue that by the age of 3, children encode and organize faces, birds and cars in a perceptual space that is strikingly similar to that of adults. Category organization for both children and adults follows Krumhansl’s (1978) distance‐density principle in which the similarity between two exemplars is jointly determined by their physical appearance and the density of neighboring exemplars in the perceptual space.