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J Vis. 2020 May 11;20(5):6. doi: 10.1167/jov.20.5.6.
Understanding developmental changes in children's use of specific visual information for recognizing object categories is essential for understanding how experience shapes recognition. Research on the development of face recognition has focused on children's use of low-level information (e.g. orientation sub-bands), or high-level information. In face categorization tasks, adults also exhibit sensitivity to intermediate complexity features that are diagnostic of the presence of a face. Do children also use intermediate complexity features for categorizing faces and objects, and, if so, how does their sensitivity to such features change during childhood? Intermediate-complexity features bridge the gap between low- and high-level processing: they have computational benefits for object detection and segmentation, and are known to drive neural responses in the ventral visual system. Here, we have investigated the developmental trajectory of children's sensitivity to diagnostic category information in intermediate-complexity features. We presented children (5-10 years old) and adults with image fragments of faces (Experiment 1) and cars (Experiment 2) varying in their mutual information, which quantifies a fragment's diagnosticity of a specific category. Our goal was to determine whether children were sensitive to the amount of mutual information in these fragments, and if their information usage is different from adults. We found that despite better overall categorization performance in adults, all children were sensitive to fragment diagnosticity in both categories, suggesting that intermediate representations of appearance are established early in childhood. Moreover, children's usage of mutual information was not limited to face fragments, suggesting the extracting intermediate-complexity features is a process that is not specific only to faces. We discuss the implications of our findings for developmental theories of face and object recognition.
了解儿童在识别物体类别时使用特定视觉信息的发展变化对于理解经验如何塑造识别至关重要。 对面部识别发展的研究主要集中在儿童对低水平信息（例如方向子带）或高水平信息的使用上。 在面孔分类任务中，成年人也表现出对中间复杂度特征的敏感性，这些特征是面孔存在的诊断特征。 儿童是否也使用中间复杂度特征对面孔和物体进行分类，如果是，他们对这些特征的敏感性在童年期间如何变化？ 中间复杂度特征弥合了低水平和高水平处理之间的差距：它们对物体检测和分割具有计算优势，并且已知会驱动腹侧视觉系统中的神经反应。 在这里，我们研究了儿童对中间复杂度特征中诊断类别信息的敏感性的发展轨迹。 我们向儿童（5-10 岁）和成年人展示了面孔（实验 1）和汽车（实验 2）的图像片段，这些片段的互信息变化量化了片段对特定类别的诊断性。 我们的目标是确定儿童是否对这些片段中的互信息量敏感，以及他们的信息使用是否与成年人不同。 我们发现，尽管成年人的整体分类表现更好，但所有儿童在两个类别中都对片段的诊断性敏感，这表明外观的中间表示在儿童早期就已建立。 此外，儿童对互信息量的使用不仅限于面孔片段，这表明提取中间复杂度特征的过程不仅限于面孔。 我们讨论了我们的发现对面部和物体识别发展理论的影响。
