Object categorisation, object naming, and viewpoint independence in visual remembering: evidence from young children's drawings of a novel object.
A simple object-drawing task confirms a three-way association between object categorisation, viewpoint independence, and longer-term visual remembering. Young children (5- to 7-year-olds) drew a familiar object or a novel object, immediately after it had been hidden from view or on the following day. Both objects were shown from a full range of viewpoints or from just two viewpoints, from neither of which would either object normally be drawn after unrestricted viewing. When drawing from short-term memory after restricted viewing, both objects were most likely to be depicted from a seen viewpoint. When drawing from longer-term memory after restricted viewing, the novel object continued to be drawn from a seen viewpoint, but the mug was now most likely to be drawn from a preferred viewpoint from which it had not been seen. Naming the novel object with a novel count noun ("Look at this. This is a dax"), to signal that it belonged to an object category, resulted in it being drawn in the same way as the familiar object. The results concur with other evidence indicating that short-term and longer-term visual remembering are differentially associated with viewpoint-dependent representations of individual objects and viewpoint independent representations of object categories, respectively.
Walker
Peter
P
Department of Psychology, University of Lancaster, UK. P.Walker@lancaster.ac.uk
Gavin Bremner
J
J
Smart
Laura
L
Pitt
Tracy
T
Apsey
Denise
D
D001154:Art; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012057:Reinforcement, Verbal; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*