Regular Article
Conceptualization of Perceptual Attributes: A Special Case for Color?

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Abstract

Young children experience difficulties establishing conceptual representations of color compared with everyday objects. We argue that comparing the development of color cognition to that of familiar objects is inappropriate since color is a perceptual attribute that can be abstracted from an object and by itself lacks functional significance. Instead, we compared the recognition, perceptual saliency, and naming of color to that of three other perceptual object attributes (motion, form, and size) in 47 children aged 2 to 5 years as a function of language age. Results revealed that, although color was perceptually salient relative to the other visual attributes, no selective impairment to color cognition (recognition and naming) was found relative to the three other visual attributes tested. Thus, when the appropriate comparisons are made, we find no special delay in the development of color conceptualization. Furthermore, the striking disparity between perceptual saliency and cognition of color in our youngest age groups suggests that perceptual saliency has little influence on the conceptual development of color.

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Supplementary Files

The supplementary material is a color version of Fig. 1. Schematic illustration of the stimuli display used in: (a) the recognition task; (b) the preferential-matching task; and (c) the attribute naming task. In (c), the attribute naming task, the stimulus pair was presented simultaneously to the left of the screen (as indicated by the dashed line) and remained on the screen as the target was presented to the right of the stimulus pair. The dashed line was not part of the stimulus display. In

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    Supplementary material (a color version of Fig. 1) is available on IDEAL (http://www.idealibrary.com). This research was supported by Medical Research Council Project Grant MT-10819 to K.T.M. We are particularly grateful to the children, staff, and directors (Ellen Unkrig Staton and Carole Montpetit, respectively) at the Royal Victoria Hospital and Montreal General Hospital daycares that kindly participated in this research. We thank Dr. Tim Ledgeway for the computer programming, Rebecca Achtman for recording the task instructions, Paul Maloney for help with an early literature review, and three anonymous reviewers for providing very helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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    Address correspondence and reprint requests to Nikki Pitchford, McGill Vision Research, Department of Ophthalmology, 687 Pine Avenue West, Rm. H4-14, Montreal, H3A 1A1, Quebec, Canada. E-mail: [email protected].

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