Danny Bernstein and Geoff Loftus : Perceptual interference in pre-school children and college students.
Work with adults demonstrates that the identification of an image is hindered by prior exposure to degraded forms of the same image. This perceptual interference is believed to result from either the activation of competing hypotheses about the image's identity or the activation and suppression of the correct hypothesis. The present study explores the developmental trajectory of perceptual interference. Three, four and five-year old children and adult controls viewed degraded pictures of common objects (e.g., "lamp"). Perceptual interference was observed in every age group, suggesting that the effect occurs early in cognitive development. The theoretical implications of this finding are discussed..