Animacy and object size are reflected in perceptual similarity computations by the preschool years

ABSTRACT

By adulthood, animacy and object size jointly structure neural responses in visual cortex and influence perceptual similarity computations. Here, we take a first step in asking about the development of these aspects of cognitive architecture by probing whether animacy and object size are reflected in perceptual similarity computations by the preschool years. We used visual search performance as an index of perceptual similarity, as research with adults suggests search is slower when distractors are perceptually similar to the target. Preschoolers found target pictures more quickly when targets differed from distractor pictures in either animacy (Experiment 1) or in real-world size (Experiment 2; the pictures themselves were all the same size), versus when they do not. Taken together, these results suggest that the visual system has abstracted perceptual features for animates vs. inanimates and big vs. small objects as classes by the preschool years and call for further research exploring the development of these perceptual representations and their consequences for neural organization in childhood.

KEYWORDS:

• Object categorization
• visual search
• animacy
• object size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We found the same pattern of effects when we changed the RT trimming procedure to only exclude trials with RTs>10 s: main effect of condition, F(1,13) = 27.77, p < .001).

2 We found the same pattern of effects when changed the reaction time trimming analysis to only exclude trials with RTs>10 s: main effect of condition, F(1,48) = 5.64, p = 0.02).