Project SCESAM
Development of Scene Grammar
The project SCESAM investigates when and how children get familiar with the regularities that characterize our daily life. These regularities, that for us adults often seem obvious, comprise for instance, that the milk belongs in the kitchen and not in the bedroom.
Would you search for the milk under the bed? Probably not, because the organization of our environment follows a certain structure. Similar to our language, our environment is composed of regularities that are formed by society and culture. Those regularities are well known to us, but they seem self-evident, so that we are not aware of them in our daily life. Examples for such rules are: The milk is in the fridge, not under the bed. The soap is on the sink, not underneath. Like the grammar of a language, we can adopt those regularities to new scenarios for instance when we are searching for the first time in the new kitchen of a friend. In sum, we refer to this set of regularities as the scene grammar or scene knowledge. We adults are perfect in using this Grammar and we are effective, when we are searching for a particular object in a scene.
Bathroom scene with pattern of eye movements (Vo & Wolfe, 2013b, p. 204)
Adult participants were asked to search for the soap in a bathroom scene. The colored area on the scene reflects the position of the gaze. The area only marks a small portion of the whole image, indicating that the attention was immediately guided to the position, where the participants where expecting the soap based on their experience (here: near the sink, Vo & Wolfe, 2013b).
When do children acquire those knowledge structures?
Selected Publications
Võ, M. L.-H. & Wolfe, J. M. (2013a). Differential ERP signatures elicited by semantic and syntactic processing in scenes. Psychological Science, 24(9), 1816 –1823.
Võ, M. L.-H. & Wolfe, J. M. (2013b). The interplay of episodic and semantic memory in guiding repeated search in scenes. Cognition, 126, 198–212.
Funding
