Children inhibit global information when the forest is dense and local information when the forest is sparse.

Visual environments are composed of global shapes and local details that compete for attentional resources. In adults, the global level is processed more rapidly than the local level, and global information must be inhibited in order to process local information when the local information and global information are in conflict. Compared with adults, children present less of a bias toward global visual information and appear to be more sensitive to the density of local elements that constitute the global level.

The forest, the trees, and the leaves: Differences of processing across development.

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e.

You can detect the trees as well as the forest when adding the leaves: evidence from visual search tasks containing three-level hierarchical stimuli.

The present study investigated how multiple levels of hierarchical stimuli (i.e., global, intermediate and local) are processed during a visual search task.

Do you want to see the tree? Ignore the forest: inhibitory control during local processing: a negative priming study of local-global processing.

The visual environment consists of global structures (e.g., a forest) made up of local parts (e.