When children get the gist: The development of rapid scene categorisation

Research surrounding adult recognition of scene gist is extensive; however, very little is known of its development. Behavioural studies of scene processing tend to broadly support a protracted developmental trajectory, with a quantitative and perhaps also qualitative shift towards more adultlike processing across middle childhood. Here we sought to better understand the very early stages of children’s scene processing by targeting gist perception. Children aged 5–10 years categorised backwards-masked scenes presented at very brief durations. We drew inferences about the processing speed with which each age group extracted category-diagnostic information by varying presentation durations, and the quality of information extracted by varying the level they were prompted to make their judgments (superordinate-level indicative of coarse global information, basic-level indicative of more detailed information). Children across all ages demonstrated a remarkably sophisticated ability to extract scene gist, with 5–6-year-old children performing above chance for scenes presented for as little as 32 ms for both superordinate and basic-level judgements. Categorisation performance also became more efficient with age. Overall, our novel findings indicate that young children possess an impressive ability to process a scene’s gist, which is followed by a protracted development towards expertise across middle childhood.