Abstract
In an experiment involving a total of 124 participants, divided into eight age groups (6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, 14-, 16-, 18-, and 20-year-olds) the development of the processing components underlying visual search for pop-out targets was tracked. Participants indicated the presence or absence of color or orientation feature singleton targets. Observers also solved a detection task, in which they responded to the onset of search arrays. There were two main results. First, analyses of inter-trial effects revealed differences in the search strategies of the 6-year-old participants compared to older age groups. Participants older than 8 years based target detection on feature-less dimensional salience signals (indicated by cross-trial RT costs in target dimension change relative to repetition trials), the 6-year-olds accessed the target feature to make a target present or absent decision (cross-trial RT costs in target feature change relative to feature repetition trials). The result agrees with predictions derived from the Dimension Weighting account and previous investigations of inter-trial effects in adult observers (Müller et al., 1995; Found and Müller, 1996). The results are also in line with theories of cognitive development suggesting that the ability to abstract specific visual features into feature categories is developed after the age of 7 years. Second, overall search RTs decreased with increasing age in a decelerated fashion. RT differences between consecutive age groups can be explained by sensory-motor maturation up to the age of 10 years (as indicated by RTs in the onset detection task). Expedited RTs in older age groups (10-, vs. 12-year-olds; 14- vs. 16-year-olds), but also in the 6- vs. 8-year-olds, are due to the development of search-related (cognitive) processes. Overall, the results suggest that the level of adult performance in visual search for pop-out targets is achieved by the age of 16.
Highlights
At any moment in time the visual system is exposed to an abundance of various colors and forms, from which those need to be selected which are conducive to current behavioral goals
REACTION TIMES Figure 2 shows mean reaction times (RTs) on target present trials of the visual search task, mean RTs of the onset detection task, and the cognitive processing times obtained by subtracting onset detection RTs from visual search RTs, separately for each age group
Visual search and onset detection RTs decreased with age with the amount of decrease getting smaller with increasing age
Summary
At any moment in time the visual system is exposed to an abundance of various colors and forms, from which those need to be selected which are conducive to current behavioral goals. Salience-based models of visual selection (Koch and Ullman, 1985; Wolfe et al, 1989; Cave and Wolfe, 1990; Treisman and Sato, 1990; Wolfe, 1994, 2007; Müller et al, 1995, 2003; Found and Müller, 1996; Itti and Koch, 2000) propose that the allocation of focal attention to a particular location of a visual scene is controlled by a feature-less priority representation (Fecteau and Munoz, 2006). Mean reaction times (RTs) were systematically modulated by whether the dimension defining the target on the current trial N was repeated or changed relative to the preceding trial N-1. RTs were statistically unaffected by whether, within a given dimension, the target was defined by the same (e.g., N-1: red → N-red) or by a different feature (e.g., N-1: lefttilted → N: right-tilted). Found and Müller (1996) interpreted their finding as evidence supporting a Dimension Weighting (DW) model of salience-based selection (Müller et al, 1995, 2003; see Krummenacher and Müller, 2012 for a recent review)
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