Abstract
Visuospatial integration, the ability to organize and coordinate information from local elements, is not well understood in development. In a size discrimination task, we evaluated two indices of visuospatial integration in 7-9 year old children and in adults: (1) the susceptibility to visual crowding and (2) the encoding of summary statistics of visual arrays. We briefly presented a target square with flanking squares 10 deg in the periphery. We then presented two choice squares and asked observers to identify which square matched the size of the target square. We found that children were generally less accurate in flanked (i.e. crowded) displays. However, they were more accurate than adults in choosing the target size from the average size of the target-flank array. Together, our results indicate that visual crowding and statistical averaging have different developmental profiles, further suggesting that they are processed by different mechanisms.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012