Abstract
The mature visual system condenses complex scenes into simple summary statistics (e.g., average size, location, orientation, etc.). However, children, often perform poorly on perceptual averaging tasks. Children's difficulties are typically thought to represent the suboptimal implementation of an adult‐like strategy. This paper examines another possibility: that children actually make decisions in a qualitatively different way to adults (optimal implementation of a non‐ideal strategy).Ninety children (6–7, 8–9, 10–11 years) and 30 adults were asked to locate the middle of randomly generated dot‐clouds. Nine plausible decision strategies were formulated, and each was fitted to observers' trial‐by‐trial response data (Reverse Correlation). When the number of visual elements was low (N < 6), children used a qualitatively different decision strategy from adults: appearing to “join up the dots” and locate the gravitational center of the enclosing shape. Given denser displays, both children and adults used an ideal strategy of arithmetically averaging individual points. Accounting for this difference in decision strategy explained 29% of children's lower precision. These findings suggest that children are not simply suboptimal at performing adult‐like computations, but may at times use sensible, but qualitatively different strategies to make perceptual judgments. Learning which strategy is best in which circumstance might be an important driving factor of perceptual development.
Highlights
The sensory world is stochastic and highly complex
While adults are highly adept at computing summary statistics, children appear to struggle
We would predict no systematic differences in preferred decision strategy but only an increase in response variability
Summary
The sensory world is stochastic and highly complex. To help separate useful signals from background noise, the mature visual system computes summary statistics that describe central tendencies in the environment. In the case of size judgments, instead of arithmetically averaging independent estimates of sizes, children may be responding based on the total surface area of the display, the size of the largest single element, the density of the elements, or so forth These strategies may not be what the experimenter intended/expected when they designed their task, and may be suboptimal given the demands of the current task. Children may average spatial information in a qualitatively similar manner to adults, but may only attend to a subset of the information available (i.e., fail to “weight” every cue appropriately—parametric inefficiency) In this case, we would predict no systematic differences in preferred decision strategy but only an increase in response variability
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