Argument Types Affect Children's Acquisition of a Novel Argument Structure.

Acquisition of an argument structure may be affected by the diversity of lexical types that appear in that structure (Conwell et al., 2011; Yang, 2016). Seventy-two 5- and 6-year-old English-speaking children completed a learning study where they were exposed to a novel argument structure and then tested on their ability to comprehend it. The number of verb types heard in the learning phase did not predict comprehension at test. However, learning with only full noun phrase arguments resulted in lower comprehension of the structure, particularly with pronouns. Hearing pronouns during learning supported comprehension of all argument types at test. These results indicate that pronominal arguments support argument structure learning by providing multiple cues that can facilitate thematic role assignment.

Children are sensitive to mutual information in intermediate-complexity face and non-face features.

Understanding developmental changes in children's use of specific visual information for recognizing object categories is essential for understanding how experience shapes recognition. Research on the development of face recognition has focused on children's use of low-level information (e.g. orientation sub-bands), or high-level information. In face categorization tasks, adults also exhibit sensitivity to intermediate complexity features that are diagnostic of the presence of a face. Do children also use intermediate complexity features for categorizing faces and objects, and, if so, how does their sensitivity to such features change during childhood? Intermediate-complexity features bridge the gap between low- and high-level processing: they have computational benefits for object detection and segmentation, and are known to drive neural responses in the ventral visual system. Here, we have investigated the developmental trajectory of children's sensitivity to diagnostic category information in intermediate-complexity features. We presented children (5-10 years old) and adults with image fragments of faces (Experiment 1) and cars (Experiment 2) varying in their mutual information, which quantifies a fragment's diagnosticity of a specific category. Our goal was to determine whether children were sensitive to the amount of mutual information in these fragments, and if their information usage is different from adults. We found that despite better overall categorization performance in adults, all children were sensitive to fragment diagnosticity in both categories, suggesting that intermediate representations of appearance are established early in childhood. Moreover, children's usage of mutual information was not limited to face fragments, suggesting the extracting intermediate-complexity features is a process that is not specific only to faces. We discuss the implications of our findings for developmental theories of face and object recognition.

Children's use of local and global visual features for material perception.

Adults can rapidly recognize material properties in natural images, and children's performance in material categorization tasks suggests that this ability develops slowly during childhood. In the current study, we further examined the information children use to recognize materials during development by asking how the use of local versus global visual features for material perception changes in middle childhood. We recruited adults and 5- to 10-year-old children for three experiments that required participants to distinguish between shape-matched images of real and artificial food. Accurate performance in this task requires participants to distinguish between a wide range of material properties characteristic of each category, thus testing material perception abilities broadly. In two tasks, we applied distinct methods of image scrambling (block scrambling and diffeomorphic scrambling) to parametrically disrupt global appearance while preserving features in small spatial neighborhoods. In the third task, we used image blurring to parametrically disrupt local feature visibility. Our key question was whether or not participant age affected performance differently when local versus global appearance was disrupted. We found that although image blur led to disproportionately poorer performance in young children, this effect was reduced or absent when diffeomorphic scrambling was used. We interpret this outcome as evidence that the ability to recruit large-scale visual features for material perception may develop slowly during middle childhood.

Neural Sensitivity to Mutual Information in Intermediate-Complexity Face Features Changes during Childhood.

One way in which face recognition develops during infancy and childhood is with regard to the visual information that contributes most to recognition judgments. Adult face recognition depends on critical features spanning a hierarchy of complexity, including low-level, intermediate, and high-level visual information. To date, the development of adult-like information biases for face recognition has focused on low-level features, which are computationally well-defined but low in complexity, and high-level features, which are high in complexity, but not defined precisely. To complement this existing literature, we examined the development of children's neural responses to intermediate-level face features characterized using mutual information. Specifically, we examined children's and adults' sensitivity to varying levels of category diagnosticity at the P100 and N170 components. We found that during middle childhood, sensitivity to mutual information shifts from early components to later ones, which may indicate a critical restructuring of face recognition mechanisms that takes place over several years. This approach provides a useful bridge between the study of low- and high-level visual features for face recognition and suggests many intriguing questions for further investigation.

Perceiving Animacy in Own-and Other-Species Faces.

Though artificial faces of various kinds are rapidly becoming more and more life-like due to advances in graphics technology (Suwajanakorn et al., 2015; Booth et al., 2017), observers can typically distinguish real faces from artificial faces. In general, face recognition is tuned to experience such that expert-level processing is most evident for faces that we encounter frequently in our visual world, but the extent to which face animacy perception is also tuned to in-group vs. out-group categories remains an open question. In the current study, we chose to examine how the perception of animacy in human faces and dog faces was affected by face inversion and the duration of face images presented to adult observers. We hypothesized that the impact of these manipulations may differ as a function of species category, indicating that face animacy perception is tuned for in-group faces. Briefly, we found evidence of such a differential impact, suggesting either that distinct mechanisms are used to evaluate the "life" in a face for in-group and out-group faces, or that the efficiency of a common mechanism varies substantially as a function of visual expertise.

The Impact of Face Inversion on Animacy Categorization.

Face animacy perception is categorical: Gradual changes in the real/artificial appearance of a face lead to nonlinear behavioral responses. Neural markers of face processing are also sensitive to face animacy, further suggesting that these are meaningful perceptual categories. Artificial faces also appear to be an "out-group" relative to real faces such that behavioral markers of expert-level processing are less evident with artificial faces than real ones. In the current study, we examined how categorical processing of real versus doll faces was impacted by the face inversion effect, which is one of the most robust markers of expert face processing. We examined how explicit categorization of faces drawn from a real/doll morph continuum was affected by face inversion (Experiment 1) and also how the response properties of the N170 were impacted by face animacy and inversion. We found that inversion does not change the position or steepness of the category boundary measured behaviorally. Further, neural markers of face processing are equally impacted by inversion regardless of whether they are elicited by real faces or doll faces. On balance, our results indicate that inversion has a limited impact on the categorical perception of face animacy.