How Adults and Children Search and Recognize Pictures

Abstract

The eye fixations of 20 young adults and 20 children, aged six, were recorded while they were recognizing or inspecting a series of displays. The test photographs presented three levels of definition for one particular scene: very blurred, blurred, or sharp. Each picture was presented for two 10-second trials. Either the very blurred or the sharp picture was given first to a particular S. The eye tracks were therefore recorded either during attempts at visual comprehension or during casual inspection. The position and sequence of the fixations of each S were recorded individually on a Polaroid copy of the original display. Eight different analysis procedures were used to study the eye tracks and all showed reliable differences between adults and children. With the sharp pictures, children lacked adequate coverage of the display; their eye tracks averaged only two-thirds the length of the adult tracks, mostly because children had twice as many very small eve movements. Adults were more skillful at visually selecting the informative areas within out-of-focus pictures; this skill calls for a delicate balance between central and peripheral vision. Children were less consistent than adults in regard to the areas they visually selected from the out-of-focus displays. Only adults attempted to relate important areas of such displays by long leaping movements of the eyes. The direction of these long movements altered when S already knew the nature of the display. Adult fixation times increased by 40 % when .Ss had to comprehend the out-of-focus displays rather than merely inspect them. In the second part of the paper, theoretical interpretations are provided.