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Familiarity with everyday naturalistic scene categories in adults and children
Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Sanjivan Loganathan1 (sanjivan.loganathan@mail.utoronto.ca), Sagana Vijayarajah1, Margaret Schlichting1; 1University of Toronto
Previous research has reported that participants' familiarity with particular scenes impacts cognition broadly, but whether effects would be similar with more general scene categories is unknown. In this study, we characterized how children and adults differ in self-reported familiarity with everyday scene categories. We predicted that adults would have greater familiarity with most categories. We asked children (n=42, 7-10 years old) and adults (n=42, 24-35 years old) to rate, compared to others their age, (1) how many different exemplars of a given category they had visited in their lifetime (1=only one to 5=many more than most people) and (2) how often they visited a given category exemplar (1=rarely to 5=frequently), from nine indoor and outdoor categories each. As responses to both questions were highly correlated, we created a composite score with both the ratings and compared them to each scene category between age groups. We found that adults were more familiar with grocery stores, city streets, clothing stores, movie theatres, and gyms than children. Children were instead more familiar with beaches, playgrounds, outdoor skating rinks and indoor swimming pools than adults. Surprisingly, we found no developmental differences in scene familiarity in many categories, including classrooms, amusement parks, libraries, zoos, farms, forests, bathrooms, bedrooms, and outdoor construction sites. Understanding the developmental differences in scene familiarity is essential for developing naturalistic scene stimulus sets for developmental research. Future work will leverage fMRI data to ask how individual differences in children's and adults' prior scene category familiarity relate to neural response.
Topic Area: METHODS: Other