To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

Four studies examined developmental differences in the representation of basic-subordinate inclusion relationships in three-, five-, and seven-year olds and undergraduates. Found that even three-year olds showed rudimentary knowledge of the asymmetry of inclusion. There was a marked developmental gap between producing subordinate category names…