Amarnath and Shashi Khosla School of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India.
Project Prakash, Dr Shroff's Charity Eye Hospital, New Delhi, India.
Br J Dev Psychol. 2024 Sep;42(3):392-408. doi: 10.1111/bjdp.12498. Epub 2024 Jun 10.
Human visual memory capacity has a rapid developmental progression. Here we examine whether image semantics modulate this progression. We assessed the performance of children (6-14 years) and young adults (19-36 years) on a visual memory task using real-world (or meaningful) as well as abstract image sets, which were matched in low-level image attributes. For real images, we find comparable performance across the two age groups, consistent with previously reported results. However, for abstract images, we find a clear age-related difference indicating greater reliance of children's memory processes on semantics, suggesting that strategies for encoding abstract patterns keep improving even into late childhood. We complemented these studies with computational experiments designed to examine the role of increasing experience with real-world images on real and abstract image encoding, to examine whether the observed age-related differences, as well as the general privilege of real over abstract images, can emerge directly through experience with meaningful images. Our results provide support for this possibility and set the stage for a finer-grained investigation of the timeline along which children's memory capacity for abstract images reaches adult levels.
人类的视觉记忆容量具有快速发展的趋势。在这里，我们研究了图像语义是否会影响这种发展趋势。我们通过使用真实世界（或有意义）和抽象图像集的视觉记忆任务评估了儿童（6-14 岁）和年轻人（19-36 岁）的表现，这些图像集在低水平的图像属性上是匹配的。对于真实图像，我们发现两个年龄组的表现相当，这与之前的报告结果一致。然而，对于抽象图像，我们发现了明显的年龄相关差异，表明儿童的记忆过程更依赖于语义，这表明即使在儿童晚期，编码抽象模式的策略也在不断改进。我们通过计算实验来补充这些研究，这些实验旨在研究随着真实世界图像经验的增加，对真实和抽象图像编码的影响，以检验所观察到的年龄相关差异，以及真实图像相对于抽象图像的一般优势，是否可以直接通过有意义的图像经验产生。我们的结果支持这种可能性，并为更细致地研究儿童对抽象图像的记忆能力达到成人水平的时间线奠定了基础。
