Grass and gravel: Investigating visual properties preschool children and adults use when distinguishing naturalistic images

Abstract

Little is known about young children's ability to visually categorize complex structures of a naturalistic environment. To investigate this, we analyzed the relevance of different visual properties and superordinate category information to 4- to 5-year-old children's (N = 76) and adults' (N = 72) card sorting decisions. Participants sorted cards depicting complex greyscale images of manmade artifacts, non-living natural elements (e.g., stones), and vegetation into groups, first according to visual similarity and then by the images' superordinate categories. We found that visual properties defined by characteristics of higher-order computations (e.g., variations in shape, distributed detail) predicted children's categorization less than adults. Both age groups' similarity judgements were influenced by the images' assigned superordinate categories—especially by vegetation. Children discriminated vegetation images better than adults when controlling for their overall lower performance. Taken together, these findings demonstrate children's adaptive and flexible processing strategies for complex naturalistic images.