Perception is not an independent, in-the-moment event. Instead, perceiving involves integrating prior expectations with current observations. How does this ability develop from infancy through adulthood? We examined how prior visual experience shapes visual perception in infants, children, and adults. Using an identical task across age groups, we…

Sixteen kindergarten and 28 first-grade children were tested on two-choice discrimination problems. A prompt light indicated the positive (rewarded) object P on all training trials, and these were followed by a single nonprompted test trial during which a new object (X) replaced either P (X-N problems) or N (P-X problems) or neither (P-N control…

Two experiments explored the nature of perceptual development in 5- and 10-year olds and adults. The primary finding was that preassessed salience significantly influenced 5-year olds' ability to discriminate two objects, while salience did not affect 10-year olds' or adults' response times. Results showed that salience effects in perceptual…

The research reported here was designed to measure the abilities of school-age children to form and generalize "visual concepts" on the basis of their observation of prepared sets of art reproductions. The art reproduction sets displayed similarities based upon various visual attributes. Discrimination of the attributes common to any…