Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We compared the influence of prior knowledge on visualperception in infants, children, and adults in order to explorethe developmental trajectory by which prior knowledge isintegrated with new sensory input. Using an identical taskacross age groups, we tested how participants’ accumulatedexperience affected their ability to judge the relative saturationlevels within a pair of sequentially-presented stimuli. We foundthat infants and children, relative to adults, showed greaterinfluence of the current observation and reduced influence ofmemory in their perception. In fact, infants and childrenoutperformed adults in discriminating between different levelsof saturation, and their performance was less biased bypreviously-experienced exemplars. Thus, the development ofperceptual integration of memory leads to less precisediscrimination in the moment, but allows observers to make useof their prior experience in interpreting a complex sensoryenvironment.