title: Emergence of global shape processing continues through adolescence.
abstract: The developmental trajectory of perceptual organization in humans is unclear. This study investigated perceptual grouping abilities across a wide age range (8-30 years) using a classic compound letter global/local (GL) task and a more fine-grained microgenetic prime paradigm (MPP) with both few- and many-element hierarchical displays. In the GL task, contrary to adults, both children and adolescents exhibited a classic local bias. In the MPP, all 3 age groups evinced a bias to individuate the few-element displays; however, the ability to encode the global shape of the many-element displays at the short prime durations increased with age. These results indicate that the full process of garnering shape information from perceptual grouping, which is essential for the ability to do fast and efficient object recognition and identification, develops late into adolescence.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. suzyscherf@cmu.edu
authors.forename: K Suzanne
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Scherf
authors.forename: Marlene
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Behrmann
authors.forename: Ruth
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kimchi
authors.forename: Beatriz
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Luna
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D001076:Aptitude; D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D005364:Field Dependence-Independence; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D000297:Psychology, Adolescent; D011930:Reaction Time; D012858:Size Perception; D055815:Young Adult