Ensemble Perception of Size in 4- to 5-Year-Old Children
Exploring Early Childhood Development
Our Partnership
In collaboration with the University of California - Berkeley, the University of Denver undertook research that explores how children aged 4-5 years experience and understand groups of objects. The project sought to include multidisciplinary perspectives as we work to understand the complexities of human development.
About Our Research
We leverage cross-institutional collaboration to address some of today’s most pressing challenges, producing interdisciplinary solutions that influence policymakers to effectively serve the public good. From Stanford to UChicago to NYU, we’ve refined our collaborative process through years of mutually beneficial relationships with institutions nationwide to understand and address challenges like climate change, HIV and youth homelessness.
DU’s current research efforts have been featured in news outlets like The New York Times. They include…
- exploring the effects of felony disenfranchisement.
- employing lasers as the medium for quantum science.
- using theatre to heal and rehabilitate inmates.
About the Project
Groups of objects are a constant feature of day-to-day life, and we know that adults are able to use ensemble-coding mechanisms to summarize a general sense of a group's overall appearance at a glance. In this project, we worked to understand how these ensemble-coding processes work in children aged 4-5 years.
To explore this question, the children viewed a pair of trees, with each containing a group of differently-sized oranges, and were asked to make an evaluation of their size. Results indicated that children use similar processes as adults, but that the mechanisms that drive such processes are not as sensitive as those in adults.