Visual displays of objects include information about number and other magnitudes such as cumulative surface area. Despite the confluence of cues, a prevalent view is that number is uniquely salient within multidimensional stimuli. Consistent with this view, Tomlinson, DeWind, and Brannon (2020) report that, in addition to greater acuity for number than area among both children and adults, number biases area judgments more than the reverse, at least in childhood. However, a failure to consider perceived area, undermines these results. To address this concern, we used an index of perceived area when assessing acuity and bias of number and area. In this context, number and area were comparable in acuity among children and adults. Bias, however, differed across development. Although adults showed greater bias of number on area judgments than the reverse, children experienced greater area bias on number judgments. Thus, contra Tomlinson et al., when differences in mathematical and perceived area are accounted for, area is more salient than number early in development. However, number does become the more salient dimension by adulthood, suggesting a role for experience with symbolic number and education in drawing attention to number within multidimensional visual stimuli.
As a reflection of prominent cultural norms, children’s literature plays an integral role in the acquisition and development of societal attitudes. Previous reports of male overrepresentation in books targeted towards children are consistent with a history of gender disparity across media and society. However, it is unknown whether such bias has been attenuated in recent years with increasing emphasis on gender equity and greater accessibility of books. Here, we provide an up-to-date estimate of the relative proportion of male and female protagonists in 3,288 children’s books (0-16 years) published between 1960-2020. We find that although the proportion of female protagonists has increased over this 60-year period, male protagonists remain overrepresented even in recent years. Importantly, we also find stable effects related to author gender, age of the target audience, book genre (fiction vs. non-fiction), and character type (human vs. non-human) on the male-to-female ratio of protagonists. We suggest that this comprehensive account of the factors influencing the rates of appearance of male and female protagonists can be leveraged to develop specific recommendations for promoting more equitable gender representation in children’s literature, with important consequences for child development and society.
Humans exhibit the remarkable ability to form abstract object representations from few exemplars, a feat not yet matched by state-of-the-art artificial neural networks. Using a habituation-dishabituation paradigm, we tested whether object learning early in human life is made possible via the medial axis of an object, known as its "shape skeleton". Shape skeletons may be ideally suited for rapid object learning because they provide a summary description of an object's internal structure, which is robust to viewpoint changes and noisy contours. Across two experiments, infants (Mage= 9.29 months; N = 82) categorized unfamiliar objects by their skeletons following exposure to a single exemplar. Their performance was robust to changes in the component parts of the objects, differences in image-level properties, and even when the coarse spatial relations of object parts were not diagnostic of category. These findings suggest a robust, and early-developing, perceptual mechanism by which objects are quickly categorized.
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