Categorical Visual Search in Children and Adults

According to the COVIS model, people have two systems of categorical learning - explicit and implicit. The explicit system is responsible for learning RB-categories, and the implicit system is responsible for II-categories. It is possible to transfer categorical learning to categorical visual search. But in adults, it occurs without the decrease in success only when learning RB-categories. When adults learn the II-categories, there is a decrease in the overall success of the assignment, and there is also a systematic decrease in success tied to the increase of number of stimuli in the absence of the target stimuli in the sample. It is known that adults tend to use explicit learning system, while for children the use of implicit system prevails. We hypothesized that the transfer to visual search will vary between children and adults. We expected children to show absence of transfer problems in the II-condition compared to adults. A new stimuli was developed during this study to be suitable both for adults and children. We conducted two experiments and compared the effects observed in children and adults. The results of the study showed that children have no drop in the success rate of categorical visual search when teaching the II-categories, but a drop in success is possible with an increase in the number of stimuli presented when learning RB-categories in the presence of the target stimuli in the sample.