Thank you to all the researchers who helped collect data, children who took part, the Norwich Science Festival team, Antje Nuthmann and Prerna Aneja for their advice in modelling our data, and to the reviewers whose comments were extrememly helpful 🙂

Overall, our findings suggest young children have an impressive ability to process scene gist, which follows a protracted development towards expertise across middle childhood

Children are great at processing scene gist!
At the superordinate level, performance is high and appears to plateau after 7-8 years.
Children struggled more with the basic task, particularly at the shorter durations where we saw no improvement with age.

At the Norwich Science Festival over 100 children aged 5-10 years categorised briefly presented scenes at the superordinate (inside vs outside) and basic level. Here’s what we found...