Three experiments assessed the development of children's part and configural (partrelational) processing in object recognition during adolescence. In total 312 school children aged 7-16 and 80 adults were tested in 3-AFC tasks to judge the correct appearance of upright and inverted presented familiar animals, artifacts, and newly learned multi-part objects, which had been manipulated either in terms of individual parts or part relations. Manipulation of part relations was constrained to either metric (animals, artifacts, and multi-part objects) or categorical (multi-part objects only) changes. For animals and artifacts, even the youngest children were close to adult levels for the correct recognition of an individual part change. By contrast, it was not until 11-12 years that they achieved similar levels of performance with regard to altered metric part relations.For the newly-learned multi-part objects, performance was equivalent throughout the tested age range for upright presented stimuli in case of categorical part-specific and partrelational changes. In case of metric manipulations, the results confirmed the data pattern observed for animals and artifacts. Together the results provide converging evidence, with studies of face recognition, for a surprisingly late consolidation of configural-metric relative to part-based object recognition.

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BackgroundPrevious research has shown that object recognition may develop well into late childhood and adolescence. The present study extends that research and reveals novel differences in holistic and analytic recognition performance in 7–12 year olds compared to that seen in adults. We interpret our data within a hybrid model of object recognition that proposes two parallel routes for recognition (analytic vs. holistic) modulated by attention.Methodology/Principal FindingsUsing a repetition-priming paradigm, we found in Experiment 1 that children showed no holistic priming, but only analytic priming. Given that holistic priming might be thought to be more ‘primitive’, we confirmed in Experiment 2 that our surprising finding was not because children’s analytic recognition was merely a result of name repetition.Conclusions/SignificanceOur results suggest a developmental primacy of analytic object recognition. By contrast, holistic object recognition skills appear to emerge with a much more protracted trajectory extending into late adolescence.

International audienceConsideration is given to the tasks that make judgements of colour similarity based on perceptual similarity rather than categorical similarity. Irrespective of whether colour categories are taken to be universal (Berlin & Kay, 1969) or language induced (Davidoff, Davies, & Roberson, 1999), it is widely assumed that colour boundaries, and hence categorical similarity, would be used when categorising colours. However, we argue that categorical similarity is more reliably used in implicit than in explicit categorisation. Thus, in Experiment 1, we found that category boundaries may be overridden in the explicit task of matching-to-sample: There was a similar strong tendency to ignore colour boundaries and to divide the range of coloured stimuli into two equal groups in both Westerners and in a remote population (Himba). In Experiment 2, we showed that a distinctive stimulus (focal colour) in the range affected the equal division in a matching-to-sample task. Experiment 3 tested the stability of a category boundary in an implicit task (visual search) that assessed categorical perception; only for this task was categorisation largely immune to range effects and largely based on categorical similarity. It is concluded that, even after colour categories are acquired, perceptual rather than categorical similarity is commonly used in judgements of colour similarity

In the visual perception literature, the recognition of faces has often been contrasted with that of non-face objects, in terms of differences with regard to the role of parts, part relations and holistic processing. However, recent evidence from developmental studies has begun to blur this sharp distinction. We review evidence for a protracted development of object recognition that is reminiscent of the well-documented slow maturation observed for faces. The prolonged development manifests itself in a retarded processing of metric part relations as opposed to that of individual parts and offers surprising parallels to developmental accounts of face recognition, even though the interpretation of the data is less clear with regard to holistic processing. We conclude that such results might indicate functional commonalities between the mechanisms underlying the recognition of faces and non-face objects, which are modulated by different task requirements in the two stimulus domains.

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Four experiments with unfamiliar objects examined the remarkably late consolidation of part-relational relative to part-based object recognition (Jüttner, Wakui, Petters, Kaur, & Davidoff, 2013). Our results indicate a particularly protracted developmental trajectory for the processing of metric part relations. Schoolchildren aged 7 to 14 years and adults were tested in 3-Alternative-Forced-Choice tasks to judge the correct appearance of upright and inverted newly learned multipart objects that had been manipulated in terms of individual parts or part relations. Experiment 1 showed that even the youngest tested children were close to adult levels of performance for recognizing categorical changes of individual parts and relative part position. By contrast, Experiment 2 demonstrated that performance for detecting metric changes of relative part position was distinctly reduced in young children compared with recognizing metric changes of individual parts, and did not approach the latter until 11 to 12 years. A similar developmental dissociation was observed in Experiment 3, which contrasted the detection of metric relative-size changes and metric part changes. Experiment 4 showed that manipulations of metric size that were perceived as part (rather than part-relational) changes eliminated this dissociation. Implications for theories of object recognition and similarities to the development of face perception are discussed.

C i t e t h i s a r t i c l e a s : E l l e y W a k u i , V o l k e r T h o m a a n d J a n W . d e F o c k e r t , V i e ws e n s i t i v e E R P r e p e t i t i o n e f f e c t s i T h i s i s a P D F f i l e o f a n u n e d i t e d m a n u s c r i p t t h a t h a s b e e n a c c e p t e d f o r p u b l i c a t i o n . A s a s e r v i c e t o o u r c u s t o m e r s w e a r e p r o v i d i n g t h i s e a r l y v e r s i o n o f t h e m a n u s c r i p t . T h e m a n u s c r i p t w i l l u n d e r g o c o p y e d i t i n g , t y p e s e t t i n g , a n d r e v i e w o f t h e r e s u l t i n g g a l l e y p r o o f b e f o r e i t i s p u b l i s h e d i n i t s f i n a l c i t a b l e f o r m . P l e a s e n o t e t h a t d u r i n g t h e p r o d u c t i o n p r o c e s s e r r o r s m a y b e d i s c o v e r e d w h i c h c o u l d a f f e c t t h e c o n t e n t , a n d a l l l e g a l d i s c l a i m e r s t h a t a p p l y t o t h e j o u r n a l p e r t a i n . AbstractThis study examined the properties of ERP effects elicited by unattended (spatially uncued) objects using a short-lag repetition-priming paradigm. Same or different common objects were presented in a yoked prime-probe trial either as intact images or slightly scrambled (half-split) versions. Behaviourally, only objects in a familiar (intact) view showed priming. An enhanced negativity was observed at parietal and occipito-parietal electrode sites within the time window of the posterior N250 after the repetition of intact, but not split, images. An additional post-hoc N2pc analysis of the prime display supported that this result could not be attributed to differences in salience between familiar intact and split views. These results demonstrate that spatially unattended objects undergo visual processing but only if shown in familiar views, indicating a role of holistic processing of objects that is independent of attention.