Thompson L A, Massaro D W
Cogn Psychol. 1989 Jul;21(3):334-62. doi: 10.1016/0010-0285(89)90012-1.
Preschool children and adults were compared in two experiments examining the basic issue of whether perceptual representations of objects are built-up from independent features along the dimensions of size and brightness. Experiment 1 was a visual search experiment. Subjects searched for targets which differed from distractors either by a single feature or by a conjunction of features. Results from preschoolers were comparable to those from adults, and were consistent with Treisman and Gelade's (1980, Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97-136) feature-integration theory of attention. Their theory states that independent features are encoded in parallel and are later combined with a spatial attention mechanism. However, children's significantly steeper conjunctive search slope indicated a slower speed of feature integration. In Experiment 2, four mathematical models of pattern recognition were tested against classification task data. The findings from both age groups were again consistent with a model assuming that size and brightness features are initially registered, and then integrated. Moreover, the data from Experiment 2 imply that perceptual growth entails small changes in the discriminability of featural representations; however, both experiments show that the operations performed on these representations are the same developmentally.
在两项实验中对学龄前儿童和成年人进行了比较，这两项实验研究了一个基本问题，即物体的知觉表征是否是由大小和亮度维度上的独立特征构建而成的。实验1是一项视觉搜索实验。受试者搜索与干扰项在单一特征或特征组合上存在差异的目标。学龄前儿童的结果与成年人的结果相当，并且与特雷斯曼和吉拉德（1980年，《认知心理学》，第12卷，97 - 136页）的注意力特征整合理论一致。他们的理论指出，独立特征是并行编码的，随后与空间注意力机制相结合。然而，儿童显著更陡的联合搜索斜率表明特征整合速度较慢。在实验2中，针对分类任务数据测试了四种模式识别数学模型。两个年龄组的研究结果再次与一个模型一致，该模型假设大小和亮度特征最初被登记，然后进行整合。此外，实验2的数据表明知觉发展意味着特征表征的可辨别性有微小变化；然而，两项实验都表明在这些表征上执行的操作在发展过程中是相同的。
