- Award ID(s):
- 1714726
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10128363
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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How do children’s visual concepts change across childhood, and how might these changes be reflected in their drawings? Here we investigate developmental changes in children’s ability to emphasize the relevant visual distinctions between object categories in their drawings. We collected over 13K drawings from children aged 2-10 years via a free-standing drawing station in a children’s museum. We hypothesized that older children would produce more recognizable drawings, and that this gain in recognizability would not be entirely explained by concurrent development in visuomotor control. To measure recognizability, we applied a pretrained deep convolutional neural network model to extract a high-level feature representation of all drawings, and then trained a multi-way linear classifier on these features. To measure visuomotor control, we developed an automated procedure to measure their ability to accurately trace complex shapes. We found consistent gains in the recognizability of drawings across ages that were not fully explained by children’s ability to accurately trace complex shapes. Furthermore, these gains were accompanied by an increase in how distinct different object categories were in feature space. Overall, these results demonstrate that children’s drawings include more distinctive visual features as they grow older.more » « less
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Abstract Music and language are two fundamental forms of human communication. Many studies examine the development of music‐ and language‐specific knowledge, but few studies compare how listeners know they are listening to music or language. Although we readily differentiate these domains, how we distinguish music and language—and especially speech and song— is not obvious. In two studies, we asked how listeners categorize speech and song. Study 1 used online survey data to illustrate that 4‐ to 17‐year‐olds and adults have verbalizable distinctions for speech and song. At all ages, listeners described speech and song differences based on acoustic features, but compared with older children, 4‐ to 7‐year‐olds more often used volume to describe differences, suggesting that they are still learning to identify the features most useful for differentiating speech from song. Study 2 used a perceptual categorization task to demonstrate that 4–8‐year‐olds and adults readily categorize speech and song, but this ability improves with age especially for identifying song. Despite generally rating song as more speech‐like, 4‐ and 6‐year‐olds rated ambiguous speech–song stimuli as more song‐like than 8‐year‐olds and adults. Four acoustic features predicted song ratings: F0 instability, utterance duration, harmonicity, and spectral flux. However, 4‐ and 6‐year‐olds’ song ratings were better predicted by F0 instability than by harmonicity and utterance duration. These studies characterize how children develop conceptual and perceptual understandings of speech and song and suggest that children under age 8 are still learning what features are important for categorizing utterances as speech or song.
Research Highlights Children and adults conceptually and perceptually categorize speech and song from age 4.
Listeners use F0 instability, harmonicity, spectral flux, and utterance duration to determine whether vocal stimuli sound like song.
Acoustic cue weighting changes with age, becoming adult‐like at age 8 for perceptual categorization and at age 12 for conceptual differentiation.
Young children are still learning to categorize speech and song, which leaves open the possibility that music‐ and language‐specific skills are not so domain‐specific.
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Abstract Most adults are better at recognizing recently encountered faces of their own race, relative to faces of other races. In adults, this race effect in face recognition is associated with differential neural representations of own‐ and other‐race faces in the fusiform face area (FFA), a high‐level visual region involved in face recognition. Previous research has linked these differential face representations in adults to viewers’ implicit racial associations. However, despite the fact that the FFA undergoes a gradual development which continues well into adulthood, little is known about the developmental time‐course of the race effect in FFA responses. Also unclear is how this race effect might relate to the development of face recognition or implicit associations with own‐ or other‐races during childhood and adolescence. To examine the developmental trajectory of these race effects, in a cross‐sectional study of European American (EA) children (ages 7–11), adolescents (ages 12–16) and adults (ages 18–35), we evaluated responses to adult African American (AA) and EA face stimuli, using functional magnetic resonance imaging and separate behavioral measures outside the scanner. We found that FFA responses to AA and EA faces differentiated during development from childhood into adulthood; meanwhile, the magnitudes of race effects increased in behavioral measures of face‐recognition and implicit racial associations. These three race effects were positively correlated, even after controlling for age. These findings suggest that social and perceptual experiences shape a protracted development of the race effect in face processing that continues well into adulthood.
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