| Discrimination was an cognitive process to find the difference of two objects. This was an essential process to categorizing, reasoning and other high level cognitive processes. Cognitive tasks had different complexities, so discrimination also had different cognitive complexity. In general, the fundamental relations that underlie discrimination could be defined at multiple levels of abstraction, which vary in cognitive complexity. The present study was to investigate the age-related change of discriminability by exploring whether or not two sequentially-presented patterns were the same at two levels of abstraction: attribute and relation, to examine the effect of dimensional salience of figures on discriminability, and to explore the effect of inhibition and visual working memory on discriminability. Subjects were aged between 3 and 5 year-olds preschool children and adults. The aim of the thesis was to analyze the bottom - top perceptual driving mechanism and top-bottom feedback mechanism of age-related change of discriminability, and to understand the mechanisms that led to the way discrimination would function in adult period.The results indicated that:1. The effects of material type, task complexity on discrimination: ①All the children elder than 3-year-olds had the discriminability between attributes and between relations. ②There was significant developmental trend for the accuracy of preschool children to discriminate relations, but not to discriminate attributes. 5-year-olds had higher accuracy to discriminate than 4- year-olds. And adults had higher accuracy to discriminate than all children participants. ③The accuracy to discriminate relations was lower than to discriminate attributes. And the reaction times(RT) to discriminate relations was longer than to discriminate attributes. ④3-year-olds had higher accuracy to discriminate attributes than to discriminate relations. ⑤ 3-year-olds had higher accuracy to discriminate color tasks than to discriminate shape... |
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