Two experiments explored whether stimulus familiarity influences prerecognition processing to generate differences in the apparent duration of tachistoscopic flashes. Subjects were 4- and 5-year-old children and adults. (MS)

In this study, developmental changes in duration of the icon (visual sensory store) were investigated with three converging tachistoscopic tasks. (1) Stimulus interuption detection (SID), a variation of the two-flash threshold method, was performed by 29 first- and 32 fifth-graders, and 32 undergraduates. Icon duration was estimated by stimulus…

Elderly subjects demonstrated significantly greater levels of persistence. Contrast relationship of the target stimulus and its background did not interact with age. Although the data were consistent with a hypothesis of increased persistence of stimuli in the senescent nervous system, problems in the direct measurement technique are evident.…

A recognition-based paradigm was used to investigate possibility that past research failed to sensitively assess infants' perception of the unity of misaligned edges in partial occlusion displays. Results suggested that habituation designs tapping recognition processes may be particularly efficacious in revealing infants' perceptual organization.…

This paper reports on three studies concerned with aspects of human visual information processing. Study I was an effort to measure the duration of iconic storage using a partial report method in children ranging in age from 6 to 13 years. Study II was designed to detect age related changes in the rate of processing (perceptually encoding) letters…

Questions the conclusions described in PS 501 739. (MB)

Described are three experiments which probed children's sensitivity to structure or organization in visual patterns. Each experiment employed a different paradigm (complexity judgment, discrimination learning, recognition learning, and memory) in order to tap different aspects of children's use of structural information. Subjects were children in…

This study investigated attention to and recognition of components in compound stimuli among infants and preschoolers. Oddity tasks with preschoolers and familiarization/novelty-preference tasks with infants demonstrated successful discrimination among stimuli components on basis of edge property information. Matching tasks with preschoolers and…

This study examined age differences in children's visual fixation and search strategies of two dimensional visual stimuli. The hypotheses tested were: (1) that no age differences exist in general search strategies regardless of stimuli position, (2) that age differences could be expected with respect to the number and duration of visual fixations,…