| Vision is an important sensory pathway to perceive the world.People are exposed to ample and various visual information every day.Among the visual information,human beings are possessed with unique behavioral and neural mechanisms in processing some perceptual specialized objects,such as faces and written words.Specifically,perceptual specialized objects are famous for being processed holistically,termed holistic processing.Previous studies have found that faces and Chinese characters are recognized rapidly.Such fast-processing capacities are believed to develop early on in one’s primary school(6-10 years old)and achieve adult-like performance at 11 years old.There are two possible reasons for children’s underdeveloped processing for faces and Chinese characters,compared with adult counterparts.One,children are worse at perceiving,i.e.,an inferior perceptual representation and encoding abilities of faces and Chinese characters.Two,children are able to perceive faces and Chinese characters,but they have an underdeveloped short-term and/or long-term memory capacity.Previous studies about faces and Chinese character recognition have not precisely teased apart the two possibilities: whether children’ lower performance on recognizing faces and Chinese characters is driven by an inferior capacity in perception or memory.Especially,the relationship between perception and memory abilities of faces and Chinese characters is unclear when children reach 6 years old.Therefore,considering the possibilities between perception and memory for face and Chinese characters can better reveal the developmental trajectory of face and Chinese character processing.Besides,both faces and Chinese characters have holistic information and feature information.Therefore,a systematic study on perceptual expertise and its holistic and feature processing,especially from a developmental perspective,can effectively contribute to the understanding of the underlying mechanism for perceptual expertise objects.This study conducted a series of experiments to explore the developmental trajectory of perception and memory for faces and Chinese characters among Chinese primary school children.Experiment 1 used the Bayesian adaptive perceptual task(QUEST)to measure the differential threshold of holistic perceptual and adopted a study-test task to measure the accuracy rate of memory.The participants included Chinese primary school students in Grade 1,Grade 3,and Grade 5,and university students from China.Experiment 2,we used the features of face and Chinese characters,explored the development trajectory of feature perception and memory of face and Chinese character in primary school children with the same experimental participants and tasks as in Experiment 1.The results were shown below.(1)The holistic perception threshold of faces and Chinese characters were significantly lower than that of the control(cars),while the differences between those of faces and Chinese characters were not significant.The feature perception threshold of Chinese characters significantly lower than that of cars and faces,while the differences between those of faces and cars were not significant.These results suggest that perceptual expertise objects have the holistic perceptual advantage.(2)In holistic perception processing,the inversion effect existed in both children and adults with no differences between age groups.The results indicate that the holistic perception processing of faces and Chinese characters of primary school children,as young as Grade 1,has already achieved adult-like performance.(3)In terms of holistic perception processing,the threshold of holistic perception of Grade 3 group was significantly higher than that in Grade 5 group.In terms of feature perception processing,the threshold of feature perception in Grade 1 group was significantly higher than that in Grade 3 group,while there was no significant difference of the threshold between Grade 3 and Grade 5 groups.Both types of perception processing in the adult group was significantly better than that in Grade 5 group.These results indicate that holistic perception and feature perception may diverge in one’s primary school,but both types of perception continue to develop since Grade 5 until adulthood.(4)There was not a significant difference between the accuracy of face holistic and that of feature memory in Grade 3 group and Grade 5 group.Also,the accuracy of Grade 5 group lower than that of the adult group.This suggests that the development trajectory of face holistic memory and feature memory may remain the same from the third grade until adult.However,the accuracy of the face feature memory was lower in Grade 1 group than that in Grade 3 group,while the two age groups did not differ in accuracy of the holistic memory.The results indicate that the development trajectory of feature and holistic memory experiences a change from Grade 1 to Grade 5.(5)The accuracy of holistic memory for Chinese characters was the lowest for Grade 1 group,followed by Grade 3,Grade 5,and the adult group.The accuracy of Chinese character feature memory in Grade 1 was lower than that in Grade 3,and the difference between Grade 3 and Grade 5 was not significant,while the accuracy of Chinese character feature memory in Grade 5 group was significantly lower than that in adult group.The above results indicates that the development trajectory of Chinese character holistic memory and feature memory are different from Grade3 to Grade 5in primary school.(6)There was a positive correlation between the holistic perception and memory for faces and Chinese characters and between the feature perception and memory for faces and Chinese characters.These findings suggest that the perception and memory may both contribute to processing perceptual expertise objects.In conclusion,the study shows that first,there are differences between the holistic and feature development trajectory as early as one’s primary school stage.Second,perception and memory may both contribute to processing perceptual expertise objects via holistic and feature processing. |
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