Scene perception and semantics

Our everyday visual environment is predictable even if particular aspects may vary from one situation to another. Mental schemes of scenes are built in an interaction with our visual environment and these schemas help us to extract very quickly the global meaning of a particular scene, i.e. the so-called gist. The characteristics of eye movement patterns during scene perception have been investigated extensively in adult participants, whereas much less is known about developmental mechanisms underlying scene perception.  Our goal in the current project is to investigate cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying development of semantic scene knowledge and semantic incongruence detection in visual scenes to answer the following questions: (i) when and how these mechanisms are developing, and (ii) to what extent the development of these mechanisms is associated with linguistic skills.