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How do children make decisions about visual information as they get older?

Summary

Children get better at making decisions about sensory information as they get older, but we don’t really know why this is the case. It could be that young children are less sensitive to visual information than adults, but they could also have different decisional strategies. In this study, we will jointly model the accuracy and reaction time of children’s decisions about visual information in order to decompose performance into distinct processing components. We will also be using electroencephalography (EEG) which is a non-invasive technique that measures brain activity at the scalp. This will help us work out what parts of processing change with age.

You can find out more about taking part in this study here

Lead Researchers

Dr Cathy Manning is the lead researcher for this project, collaborating with Gaia, Prof Tony Norcia at Stanford University, California, and Prof Eric-Jan Wagenmakers at the University of Amsterdam. Suzi Laws, an undergraduate student from the University of St Andrews, is also helping on the project.

 

Funded by

The project is currently funded by an Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) small grant awarded to Cathy Manning: “How do children make decisions about visual information as they get older?”.

From August 2017, we will be investigating whether children on the autism spectrum make decisions differently, which will be funded by Cathy’s Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship.