Developmental Changes in Visual Object Recognition Between 18 and 24 Months of Age

Two experiments examined developmental changes in children's visual recognition of common objects during the period of 18 to 24 months. Experiment 1 examined children's ability to recognize common category instances that presented three different kinds of information: (1) richly detailed and prototypical instances that presented both local and global shape information, color, textural and featural information, (2) the same rich and prototypical shapes but no color, texture or surface featural information, or (3) that presented only abstract and global representations of object shape in terms of geometric volumes. Significant developmental differences were observed only for the abstract shape representations in terms of geometric volumes, the kind of shape representation that has been hypothesized to underlie mature object recognition. Further, these differences were strongly linked in individual children to the number of object names in their productive vocabulary. Experiment 2 replicated these results and showed further that the less advanced children's object recognition was based on the piecemeal use of individual features and parts, rather than overall shape. The results provide further evidence for significant and rapid developmental changes in object recognition during the same period children first learn object names. The implications of the results for theories of visual object recognition, the relation of object recognition to category learning, and underlying developmental processes are discussed.