Abstract
It is clear that adults can use pictorial depth cues to detect that a simple drawing specifies an impossible object. Recent studies have suggested that 4-month-old infants have a similar ability. Infants looked at a drawing of an impossible object for a longer period of time than a drawing of a possible object (Shuwairi and Johnson 2012). The findings suggest that sensitivity to depth order specified by the location of T-junctures as well as the ability to integrate local depth information into a global representation is present early in development. In addiction, work by Young and Deregowski (1981) has found that 7-year-old children were less able to discriminate possible objects compared to older children. The goal of this work is to use an eye tracking apparatus to investigate developmental changes in the sequence of fixations that take place when impossible objects are viewed. As part of this project fixation durations were recorded using a Tobii eye-tracker on 8-year-old-children. We found that 10 out of the 12 children (p<0.05 by sign test) fixated the relevant part of the impossible figure longer than the corresponding possible region. Future work will investigate developmental changes in the ability children to detect the impossible of a variety of drawings and the sequence of eye fixations used in the task.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013