Abstract
Children until the age of five are only able to reverse an ambiguous figure when they are informed about the second interpretation. In two experiments, we examined whether children’s difficulties would extend to a continuous version of the ambiguous figures task. Children (Experiment 1: 66 3- to 5-year olds; Experiment 2: 54 4- to 9-year olds) and adult controls saw line drawings of animals gradually morph—through well-known ambiguous figures—into other animals. Results show a relatively late developing ability to recognize the target animal, with difficulties extending beyond preschool-age. This delay can neither be explained with improvements in theory of mind, inhibitory control, nor individual differences in eye movements. Even the best achieving children only started to approach adult level performance at the age of 9, suggesting a fundamentally different processing style in children and adults.
Highlights
Reversible or ambiguous figures like the Rubin’s face/vase picture or the Necker cube have been used to study how people spontaneously alternate between two mutually exclusive interpretations of objectively stable pictures
The average picture number at which a switch was reported across all valid sets was submitted to an analysis of variance (ANOVA) for participant group
There was no clear developmental improvement despite older children outperforming younger children on theory of mind and inhibitory control (Table 1). While these factors have affected the probability of content informed reversal in previous studies (Bialystok & Shapero, 2005; Doherty & Wimmer, 2005; Gopnik & Rosati, 2001; Mitroff et al, 2006; but see Ropar Mitchell, & Ackroyd, 2003), none of these measures affected performance on the picture morphing task
Summary
Reversible or ambiguous figures like the Rubin’s face/vase picture or the Necker cube have been used to study how people spontaneously alternate between two mutually exclusive interpretations of objectively stable pictures. The current set of studies was designed to further investigate this question Another reason to investigate this phenomenon developmentally is that children, even when informed about the ambiguity, are unlikely to reverse. The picture morphing task, provides several advantages over the standard ambiguous figure task: (1) the continuous measure makes it possible to test children younger than 5 years, who would have otherwise rarely reversed (Gopnik & Rosati, 2001). Wimmer and Doherty (2011) found that performance on the day/night Stroop task (Gerstadt, Hong, & Diamond, 1994), a measure of inhibitory control, predicted ambiguous figure switching. In Experiment 2, we tested older children (up to 9 years) to examine at which age the ability to report the second object in the picture morphing task improves
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