Abstract
Previous studies have shown that adults are able to remember more than 1,000 images with great detail. However, little is known about the development of this visual capacity, nor its presence early in life. This study tests the level of detail of young children’s memory for a large number of items, adapting the method of Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, and Oliva (2008). Four- and six-year-old children were shown more than 100 images of everyday objects. They were then tested for recognition of familiar items in a binary decision task. The identity of the foil test item was manipulated in three conditions (Category, Exemplar, and State). Children demonstrated high accuracy across all conditions, remembering not only the basic-level category (Category), but also unique details (Exemplar), and information about position and arrangement of parts (State). These findings demonstrate that children spontaneously encode a high degree of visual detail. Early in life, visual memory exhibits high fidelity and extends over a large set of items.
Highlights
The capacity to form and retrieve visual representations of objects is a central aspect of human cognition
Preserving detailed aspects of these object representations holds functional importance for everyday activities: We may want to remember which kitchen implement had been washed, which particular category member was used in a recipe, or in what particular state a given individual item was left. In support of these commonplace tasks, studies have shown that the information capacity of visual memory in adults is surprisingly detailed as well as impressively large (Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, & Oliva, 2008; Konkle, Brady, Alvarez, & Oliva, 2010). Is this capacity the outcome of adults’ massive exposure to objects and their regular engagement in tasks that require object discrimination based on subtle differences? Or does it reflect a signature characteristic of the human visual memory system, present even without lifelong practice? If so, this capacity should be present in children, despite their more limited need to remember detailed differences among objects
Little work has been done to investigate the overall capacity and level of detail inherent in children’s visual memory, and whether the Katrina Ferrara is at the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, Department of Neurology, Georgetown University, and Sarah Furlong is in the Clinical and Cognitive Psychology Graduate Program, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Summary
The capacity to form and retrieve visual representations of objects is a central aspect of human cognition. Preserving detailed aspects of these object representations holds functional importance for everyday activities: We may want to remember which kitchen implement had been washed (a spoon or a spatula?), which particular category member was used in a recipe (serrated knife or a smooth blade?), or in what particular state a given individual item was left (toaster oven open or closed?) In support of these commonplace tasks, studies have shown that the information capacity of visual memory in adults is surprisingly detailed as well as impressively large (Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, & Oliva, 2008; Konkle, Brady, Alvarez, & Oliva, 2010).
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