Children and adults see the world differently

Children and adults see the world differently

Scientists at UCL (University College London) and Birkbeck, University of London have found that children younger than 12 do not combine different sensory information to make sense of the world as adults do. The results are :Children are able to keep information from their senses separate and may therefore perceive the visual world differently unlike adults.


Children below 12 years old do not combine different sensory information to make sense of the world as adults do.

Children’s experience of the visual world is very different to that of adults.

Based on this experiment,scientists asked children and adults wearing 3D glasses to compare two slanted surfaces and judge which is the
“flattest”, given perspectiveand binocular information separately, or both together.

It was not until 12 years that children combined perspective and binocular information to improve the accuracy in their judgements, as adults do

This implies that adults combine different kinds of visual information into a single unified estimate, whereas children do not.

Scientists asked whether children might be able to avoid sensory fusion by keeping visual information separate. Researchers used special 3D
 discs in which perspective and binocular information sometimes disagreed.

Adults tended to take an average of the perspective and the binocular information, they were poor at determining whether the slant of some
discs was the same or different as a comparison disc.

 By contrast, 6-year-olds had no trouble in spotting differences between discs of this kind. This shows that 6-year-olds can “see” separate kinds
 of visual information that adults cannot.