title: Pleasant emotional induction broadens the visual world of young children.
abstract: These experiments aimed at studying the influence of emotional context on global/local visual processing in children. Children 5 years old, known to present an immature global visual bias, and 8 years old, known to pay attention predominantly to global information, were placed in either a neutral or pleasant emotional context and subsequently presented with a global/local visual judgement task. As with previous findings for adults, both age groups presented a pronounced perceptual bias toward global information following exposure to emotionally pleasant pictures. Interestingly, younger children, who do not present a global bias during the neutral exposure, presented the same preference for global information as older children when exposed to the pleasant context. These findings indicate that emotion may strongly affect visual perception in children, with important implications for educational practice and models of cognition.
authors.affiliation: UMR6232 (CI-NAPS), CNRS, CEA, Université de Caen, Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France. nicolas.poirel@parisdescartes.fr
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Poirel
authors.forename: Mathieu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cassotti
authors.forename: Virginie
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Beaucousin
authors.forename: Arlette
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pineau
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Houdé
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D014796:Visual Perception