Children inhibit global information when the forest is dense and local information when the forest is sparse

• Published in: Journal of experimental child psychology 2018-09, Vol.173, p.155-167
• Main Authors: Krakowski, Claire-Sara, Borst, Grégoire, Vidal, Julie, Houdé, Olivier, Poirel, Nicolas
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Attention - physiology; Child; Children; Cognition - physiology; Cognitive science; Compound stimuli; Development; Female; Global processing; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Inhibition; Inhibition (Psychology); Local processing; Male; Negative priming; Neuropsychological Tests; Psychology; Visual Perception - physiology; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0022-0965; 1096-0457
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.03.020

•The visual environment consists of global shapes made up of local details.•In adults, global information must be inhibited to process local information.•Children present less of a bias toward global visual information.•Children and adults have to inhibit salient global information during a local task.•Only children have to inhibit local information to process the less salient global level. Visual environments are composed of global shapes and local details that compete for attentional resources. In adults, the global level is processed more rapidly than the local level, and global information must be inhibited in order to process local information when the local information and global information are in conflict. Compared with adults, children present less of a bias toward global visual information and appear to be more sensitive to the density of local elements that constitute the global level. The current study aimed, for the first time, to investigate the key role of inhibition during global/local processing in children. By including two different conditions of global saliency during a negative priming procedure, the results showed that when the global level was salient (dense hierarchical figures), 7-year-old children and adults needed to inhibit the global level to process the local information. However, when the global level was less salient (sparse hierarchical figures), only children needed to inhibit the local level to process the global information. These results confirm a weaker global bias and the greater impact of saliency in children than in adults. Moreover, the results indicate that, regardless of age, inhibition of the most salient hierarchical level is systematically required to select the less salient but more relevant level. These findings have important implications for future research in this area.