Work

Developmental changes in the precision of visual concept knowledge

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: How precise are the visual representations that underlie children’s understanding of words, and how does this precision change across development? We assessed children’s visual vocabulary knowledge in a game where children heard a word (e.g., “swordfish”) and had to choose a matching picture. Distractors were chosen to vary in their linguistic similarity to each target word in a multimodal language model. We collected data from a large sample of children (N = 3575, 3–14 year olds) and adults (N = 211 adults) and found gradual changes over developmental age ranges in participants’ ability to identify the image that a word referred to. When children made errors, younger children were more likely to choose unrelated distractors than older children; error patterns were best explained by combining linguistic and visual similarity. These results highlight that children have partial knowledge about many visual concepts and document a transition from coarse to finer-grained representations.

Source: Journal of Vision

DOI: 10.1167/jov.24.10.776

Authors: Bria Long, Wanjing Anya Ma, Alvin Wei Ming Tan, Rebecca Silverman, Michael C. Frank, Jason D. Yeatman

Institutions: University of California San Diego, Stanford University, University of Oxford

Language: English

Topic: Categorization, perception, and language

Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,850