Watanabe Ryoichi, Tsuchiya Naotsugu, Qianchen Liang, Myowa Masako, Moriguchi Yusuke
Graduation School of Letters, Kyoto University, Yoshidahonmachi, Sakyo Ward, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan.
School of Psychological Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Science, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia.
Neurosci Conscious. 2025 Aug 7;2025(1):niaf019. doi: 10.1093/nc/niaf019. eCollection 2025.
Recent studies on brief scene perception have revealed that adults discriminate between what they see and do not see in a photograph with varying degrees of confidence. In this study, we attempt to extend previous studies by asking if these perceptual/cognitive abilities are already established in preschool and school-aged children. In Experiment 1 ( = 122) and 2 ( = 205, registered report), using an online experiment, we briefly presented a natural scene (267 ms in Experiment 1 and 133 ms in Experiment 2) to participants and, subsequently, asked them if a small patch was included in the original scene. Experiment 2 was a registered report. We tested various patch locations to probe "how much" the participants can see and report about it with graded levels of confidence. In Experiment 1, discriminative performance was nearly saturated (the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC)) = 0.9 across age groups) with no effects of ages, but metacognition slightly improved across ages (AUC = 0.74 in 5-6-year-olds to 0.79 in adults). In a critical registered report (Experiment 2), with reduced stimulus duration, we found a developmental effect (AUC = 0.73 in 5-6-year-olds to 0.91 in adults), and, again, metacognitive accuracy was constant across development (AUC = 0.73 in 5-6-year-olds to 0.75 in adults). Additionally, our analysis of semantic congruence between objects and scenes revealed age-related differences in performance. Contrary to our expectation, the size of the image modification strongly affected task performance, uniformly across ages. Overall, we conclude that 5-6-year-olds' perceptual and metacognitive abilities are much better than we expected when they were tested with briefly presented natural scenes, although their performances were generally lower than adults.
近期关于简短场景感知的研究表明，成年人在辨别照片中自己看到和没看到的内容时，有着不同程度的自信。在本研究中，我们试图通过询问这些感知/认知能力在学龄前和学龄儿童中是否已经确立来扩展先前的研究。在实验1（N = 122）和实验2（N = 205，预注册报告）中，我们通过在线实验向参与者简要呈现一个自然场景（实验1中为267毫秒，实验2中为133毫秒），随后询问他们原始场景中是否包含一个小斑块。实验2是一份预注册报告。我们测试了不同的斑块位置，以探究参与者能够“看到多少”并以不同的自信程度进行报告。在实验1中，辨别性能几乎达到饱和（接受者操作特征曲线下面积（AUC）= 0.9，各年龄组无差异），但元认知在各年龄组中略有改善（5 - 6岁儿童的AUC为0.74，成年人的AUC为0.79）。在一项关键的预注册报告（实验2）中，随着刺激持续时间的缩短，我们发现了发展效应（5 - 6岁儿童的AUC为0.73，成年人的AUC为0.91），并且，同样地，元认知准确性在整个发展过程中保持不变（5 - 6岁儿童的AUC为0.73，成年人 的AUC为0.75）。此外，我们对物体与场景之间语义一致性的分析揭示了表现上的年龄相关差异。与我们的预期相反，图像修改的大小对任务表现有强烈影响，且在各年龄组中一致。总体而言，我们得出结论，当用简要呈现的自然场景对5 - 6岁儿童进行测试时，他们的感知和元认知能力比我们预期的要好得多，尽管他们的表现总体上低于成年人。
