@phdthesis{Schlegelmilch2021,
  author    = {Schlegelmilch, Karola},
  title     = {Grass or gravel? Influences on the visual categorization of naturalistic structures in infancy and early childhood},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-52637},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-526370},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {xiv, 218},
  year      = {2021},
  abstract  = {Detecting and categorizing particular entities in the environment are important visual tasks that humans have had to solve at various points in our evolutionary time. The question arises whether characteristics of entities that were of ecological significance for humans play a particular role during the development of visual categorization. The current project addressed this question by investigating the effects of developing visual abilities, visual properties and ecological significance on categorization early in life. Our stimuli were monochromatic photographs of structure-like assemblies and surfaces taken from three categories: vegetation, non-living natural elements, and artifacts. A set of computational and rated visual properties were assessed for these stimuli. Three empirical studies applied coherent research concepts and methods in young children and adults, comprising (a) two card-sorting tasks with preschool children (age: 4.1-6.1 years) and adults (age: 18-50 years) which assessed classification and similarity judgments, (b) a gaze contingent eye-tracking search task which investigated the impact of visual properties and category membership on 8-month-olds' ability to segregate visual structure. Because eye-tracking with infants still provides challenges, a methodological study (c) assessed the effect of infant eye-tracking procedures on data quality with 8- to 12-month-old infants and adults. In the categorization tasks we found that category membership and visual properties impacted the performance of all participant groups. Sensitivity to the respective categories varied between tasks and over the age groups. For example, artifact images hindered infants' visual search but were classified best by adults, whereas sensitivity to vegetation was highest during similarity judgments. Overall, preschool children relied less on visual properties than adults, but some properties (e.g., rated depth, shading) were drawn upon similarly strong. In children and infants, depth predicted task performance stronger than shape-related properties. Moreover, children and infants were sensitive to variations in the complexity of low-level visual statistics. These results suggest that classification of visual structures, and attention to particular visual properties is affected by the functional or ecological significance these categories and properties may have for each of the respective age groups. Based on this, the project highlights the importance of further developmental research on visual categorization with naturalistic, structure-like stimuli. As intended with the current work, this would allow important links between developmental and adult research.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{MehnertAkhrifTelkemeyeretal.2013,
  author    = {Mehnert, Jan and Akhrif, Atae and Telkemeyer, Silke and Rossi, Sonja and Schmitz, Christoph H. and Steinbrink, Jens and Wartenburger, Isabell and Obrig, Hellmuth and Neufang, Susanne},
  title     = {Developmental changes in brain activation and functional connectivity during response inhibition in the early childhood brain},
  series = {Brain and development : official journal of the Japanese Society of Child Neurology},
  volume    = {35},
  journal   = {Brain and development : official journal of the Japanese Society of Child Neurology},
  number    = {10},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {Amsterdam},
  issn      = {0387-7604},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.braindev.2012.11.006},
  pages     = {894 -- 904},
  year      = {2013},
  abstract  = {Response inhibition is an attention function which develops relatively early during childhood. Behavioral data suggest that by the age of 3, children master the basic task requirements for the assessment of response inhibition but performance improves substantially until the age of 7. The neuronal mechanisms underlying these developmental processes, however, are not well understood. In this study, we examined brain activation patterns and behavioral performance of children aged between 4 and 6 years compared to adults by applying a go/no-go paradigm during near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) brain imaging. We furthermore applied task-independent functional connectivity measures to the imaging data to identify maturation of intrinsic neural functional networks. We found a significant group x condition related interaction in terms of inhibition-related reduced right fronto-parietal activation in children compared to adults. In contrast, motor-related activation did not differ between age groups. Functional connectivity analysis revealed that in the children's group, short-range coherence within frontal areas was stronger, and long-range coherence between frontal and parietal areas was weaker, compared to adults. Our findings show that in children aged from 4 to 6 years fronto-parietal brain maturation plays a crucial part in the cognitive development of response inhibition.},
  language  = {en}
}