Stanovich K E, West R F
Child Dev. 1978 Dec;49(4):1223-6.
Several studies have demonstrated that adults display a category effect in visual search paradigms. That is, when searching an array for the presence of a target letter, subjects detect the letter faster when the array is composed of numbers rather than letters, and vice versa. Groups of 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults searched for the presence of a target in fields of items that were either of the same or a different category (letter or number) than the target. Highly significant category effects were evident in the search times of all 3 age groups. While search times were found to decrease with development, there was no evidence of an increasing effect of category with age. It was concluded that the feature extraction process that mediates the category effect is fully automated by age 8.
多项研究表明，成年人在视觉搜索范式中表现出类别效应。也就是说，当在一组元素中搜索目标字母时，如果这组元素由数字而非字母组成，受试者能更快地检测到该字母，反之亦然。8岁、10岁儿童组以及成年组在与目标属于相同或不同类别（字母或数字）的元素组中搜索目标的存在。在所有这三个年龄组的搜索时间中，都明显存在高度显著的类别效应。虽然发现搜索时间会随着发育而减少，但没有证据表明类别效应会随着年龄增长而增强。研究得出结论，介导类别效应的特征提取过程在8岁时就已完全自动化。
