Discrimination Between Fantastic and Ordinary Visual Displays by Children and Adults

ABSTRACT

Two experiments tested the ability to distinguish between ordinary and fantastic complex visual displays in 6- and 9-year-old children and adults. In Experiment 1, adults found discrimination between ordinary and fantastic visual realities (Task 1) as clear and manageable as the discrimination between pictures that included or did not include human characters (Task 2), but 6- and 9-year-old children did significantly better on Task 2 than on Task 1. Children performed significantly poorer than adults on discrimination between ordinary and fantastic pictures. Other data confirmed that this difference in accuracy of discrimination between 9-year-olds and adults can’t be explained by the 9-year-olds’ general cognitive deficit. This suggests that children’s understanding of the difference between pictures representing ordinary and fantastic realities is a result of special experience with magical reality, rather than a result of general cognitive growth. On both tasks, six-year-olds performed significantly worse than 9-year olds. This supports the hypothesis that there is a developmental progression on the capacity to discriminate between ordinary and fantastic visual realities. In Experiment 2, the same tasks were given to adult participants without identifying the criterion for classification. For Task 1, participants spontaneously used the ordinary/fantastic distinction as a criterion for classification with the frequency significantly above chance, but for Task 2, the frequency of the in-built criterion (presence or absence of people) dropped down to chance level. The results show salience of the distinction between ordinary and fantastic visual realities.

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