Children are sensitive to mutual information in intermediate-complexity face and nonface features

Le résumé fourni par la source

Uncovering when children learn to use specific visual information for recognizingobject categories is essential for understanding how experience shapes recognition.Research on the development of face recognition has focused on children’s use oflow-level information (e.g. orientation sub-bands), or on children's use of high-levelinformation, namely, configural or holistic information. Do children also useintermediate complexity features for categorizing faces and objects, and if so, atwhat age? Intermediate-complexity features bridge the gap between low- and high- level processing: they have computational benefits for object detection and segmentation, and are known to drive neural responses in the ventral visual system.Here, we asked when children develop sensitivity to diagnostic category information in intermediate-complexity features. We presented children (5-10 years old) and adults with image fragments of faces (Experiment 1) and cars (Experiment 2) varying in their mutual information, which quantities a fragment's diagnosticity of a specific category. Our goal was to determine whether children were sensitive to the amount of mutual information in these fragments, and if their information usage is different from adults’. We found that despite better overall categorization performance in adults, all children were sensitive to fragment diagnosticity in both categories, suggesting that intermediate representations of appearance are established early in childhood. Moreover, children's usage of mutual information was not limited to face fragments, suggesting the extracting intermediate complexity features is a process that is not specific only to faces. We discuss the implications of our findings for developmental theories of face and object recognition.

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