The Development Of Visual Perception Expertise In Children

Both faces and characters are very important stimulus in our daily life, and all Chinese people are experts of the two stimulus. Although they are distinctive in both form and function, they are nonetheless remarkably similar on a number of dimensions, for example, faces and Chinese characters are often processed at the individual level. In recent years, some researchers have explored faces and Chinese characters, and reached a near-unanimous conclusion:there were some relationship between faces and Chinese scripts. But studies about this are still relatively scarce and subjects are all adults. Importantly, works in terms of the development of faces and Chinese on children have not been carried on. Therefore, this article studied faces and Chinese characters from unique developmental perspective.This study has three experiments, including Grade1, Grade3, Grade5, and university students. Experiment1aims to explore the development of inversion effect of faces and Chinese characters, in which participants judge whether the upright or inverted stimulus are the same or not. Experiment2is designed to investigate the development of composite effect of faces and Chinese characters, participants need to answer whether it is the same or not for the part of the target stimulus. Experiment3asks subjects to judge the distance changes of the stimulus to investigate the effect of space distance.The main findings and conclusions of the present investigation are as follows:(1) Face and character recognition performance have been in the development from the first grade to college students. (2) Inversion effect of Chinese characters and faces have emerged in the first grade, and it always developed and changed from young primary school children to adults.(3) Children from Grade5have obtained composite effect of faces, but all subjects didn’t show this composite effect on the recognition of Chinese characters.(4) The effect of the space distance of faces and Chinese characters has been developing from young primary school, and becomes mature until adults. For children from grade5, the cognitive abilities of the face space have been closed to the adults’level, but it is not the same as for Chinese character.