Human visual object recognition is multifaceted and comprised of several domains of expertise. Developmental relations between young children's letter recognition and their 3-dimensional object recognition abilities are implicated on several grounds but have received little research attention. Here, we ask how preschoolers' success in recognizing letters relates to their ability to recognize 3-dimensional objects from sparse shape information alone. Seventy-three 2 1/2 to 5-year-old children completed a “Letter Recognition” task, measuring the ability to identify a named letter among 3 letters, and a “Shape Caricature Recognition” task, measuring recognition of familiar objects from sparse, abstract information about their part shapes and the spatial relations among those parts. Children also completed a control “Shape Bias” task, in which success depends on matching exact shapes but not on building an internal representation of the configuration of features characteristic of an object category or letter. Children's success in letter recognition was positively related to their shape caricature recognition scores, but not to their shape bias scores. The results suggest that letter recognition builds upon developing skills in attending to and representing the relational structure of object shape, and that these skills are common to both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional object perception.

中文翻译：

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早期物体识别技能之间的关系：物体和字母

人类视觉对象识别是多方面的，由多个专业领域组成。幼儿字母识别与他们的 3 维物体识别能力之间的发展关系有多种原因，但很少受到研究关注。在这里，我们询问学龄前儿童识别字母的成功与他们仅从稀疏的形状信息中识别 3 维对象的能力有何关系。73 名 2 1/2 至 5 岁的儿童完成了“字母识别”任务，测量从 3 个字母中识别一个命名字母的能力，以及“形状漫画识别”任务，测量对熟悉物体的识别。 ，关于它们的零件形状和这些零件之间的空间关系的抽象信息。孩子们还完成了一项控制“形状偏差”的任务，其中成功取决于匹配精确的形状，而不是建立一个对象类别或字母特征的特征配置的内部表示。儿童在字母识别方面的成功与他们的形状漫画识别分数呈正相关，但与他们的形状偏差分数无关。结果表明，字母识别建立在培养注意和表示物体形状的关系结构的技能的基础上，并且这些技能对于二维和 3 维物体感知都是通用的。但不是他们的形状偏差分数。结果表明，字母识别建立在培养注意和表示物体形状的关系结构的技能的基础上，并且这些技能对于二维和 3 维物体感知都是通用的。但不是他们的形状偏差分数。结果表明，字母识别建立在培养注意和表示物体形状的关系结构的技能的基础上，并且这些技能对于二维和 3 维物体感知都是通用的。