Developmental Changes in Measures of Hierarchical Stimulus Recognition in Conditions of Directed Attention in Children Aged 5–10 Years

The forest, the trees, and the leaves: Differences of processing across development.

“…First, our results showed that local targets were perceptively less salient from 5-year-old children to adulthood, with slower RTs compared with other levels and more errors for the two younger age groups (5-and 6-year-old children). We thus replicated the results of previous studies using hierarchical figures with normaldensity (Dukette & Stiles, 1996;Harrison & Stiles, 2009;Kimchi et al, 2005;Krupskaya & Machinskaya, 2012;Mondloch et al, 2003;Ozonoff et al, 1994;Plaisted et al, 1999). Our results also reported an age-variability for the most salient level in a competitive context (when the target simultaneously appears with distractors).…”

“…Nevertheless, results appear to diverge for older children, depending on the task used; the size, density and meaning of the hierarchical stimuli; and the condition of occurrence (Dukette & Stiles, 1996; Poirel, Mellet, et al, 2008). In classical Navon-type detection tasks, a global bias is reported in 5-to-6-year-old (Krupskaya & Machinskaya, 2012; Ozonoff, Strayer, McMahon, & Filloux, 1994; Plaisted, Swettenham, & Rees, 1999). Nevertheless, using a different paradigm with smaller figures, Scherf, Behrmann, Kimchi, and Luna (2009) observed the existence of a local bias that disappeared only at the end of adolescence.…”

“…Nonetheless, several questions about the development of local–global processing still remain unclear. An attentional dominance for the global level is often reported in children (Dukette & Stiles, 1996; Krupskaya & Machinskaya, 2012; Mondloch et al, 2003). However, the results of Kimchi et al (2005) seemed to indicate that, rather than a global advantage, the local level may be disadvantaged during the competition for attentional resources.…”

“…In particular, the present study aimed to uncover whether the local level inefficiency observed in adults (Krakowski et al, 2015) will also exist in children. Some developmental studies have revealed a global dominance (Dukette & Stiles, 1996; Krupskaya & Machinskaya, 2012; Mondloch et al, 2003), whereas some others revealed a local dominance (Poirel et al, 2012; Scherf et al, 2009; Vinter et al, 2010). By adding a new hierarchical level, we should precisely describe how attention is spread across items at each age.…”

Perceptual biases during cued task switching relate to decision process differences between children and adults.

“…In particular, global features capture their perception in selective attention tasks. While both adults and children can attend to global and local aspects of stimuli, there are many contexts where young children prioritize global features (Huizinga, Burack, & Van der Molen, 2010; Kimchi, Hadad, Behrmann, & Palmer, 2005; Krupskaya & Machinskaya, 2012; Vinter, Puspitawati, & Witt, 2010). Children can use overall similarity between multidimensional stimuli as a main categorization strategy (Smith, 1981), for example, grouping cartoon people by number of shared features, despite knowledge of the critical category feature (a symbol on their stomach; Deng & Sloutsky, 2015).…”