30 Nov
2010
30 Nov
'10
12:02 p.m.
The next talk in the Cognitive Development Center seminar series will
be given by
Davie Yoon, Stanford University
Date: Wednesday, December 1, 2010, 5 PM
Cultural and individual differences in visual cognition
Where do our practices of interpreting and attending to the visual
world come from? In this talk, I will discuss two lines of research
that address this broad question in different ways. In the first
project, I will describe young children's (3 to 5-year-olds) striking
deficit in recognizing two-tone / Mooney-type images. These images are
trivial for adults to recognize with a sufficient cue, such as the
original photograph from which the two-tone was derived. We also find
that adults from a remote Amazonian tribe (Piraha) show a similar
deficit, and that when the need to comprehend the referential
relationship between the two-tone and photos is removed, children's
recognition improves. This suggests the phenomenon is related to
visual symbolic expertise (c.f., DeLoache), rather than the
consequence of an immature visual system. In a separate line of
research, I will discuss individual differences in viewing an
important social stimulus: the human face. We measured participants'
self-reported degree of autism-associated traits, and also collected
eye-tracking data as they watched a video of a person speaking under
two conditions: (1) gaze directed at the participant, (2) gaze
averted. We found that individual differences in the level of
self-reported autistic-like traits predicted different levels of
direct gaze reciprocation (greater gaze to eye region in the direct vs
the averted condition), perhaps an indication of the importance of
nonconscious gaze mimcry in successful social interactions.
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