Emergence of perceptual reorganisation from prior knowledge in human development and Convolutional Neural Networks

The use of prior knowledge to guide perception is fundamental to human vision, especially under challenging viewing circumstances. Underpinning current theories of predictive coding, prior knowledge delivered to early sensory areas via cortical feedback connections can reshape perception of ambiguous stimuli, such as 'two-tone' images. Despite extensive interest and ongoing research into this process of perceptual reorganisation in the adult brain, it is not yet fully understood how or when the efficient use of prior knowledge for visual perception develops. Here we show for the first time that adult-like levels of perceptual reorganisation do not emerge until late childhood. We used a behavioural two-tone paradigm to isolate the effects of prior knowledge on visual perception in children aged 4 - 12 years and adults, and found a clear developmental progression in the perceptual benefit gained from informative cues. Whilst photo cueing reliably triggered perceptual reorganisation of two-tones for adults, 4- to 9-year-olds' performed significantly poorer immediately after cueing than within-subject benchmarks of recognition. Young childens' behaviour revealed perceptual biases towards local image features, as has been seen in image classification neural networks. We tested three such models (AlexNet, CorNet and NASNet) on two-tone classification, and while we found that network depth and recurrence may improve recognition, the best-performing network behaved similarly to young children. Our results reveal a prolonged development of prior-knowledge-guided vision throughout childhood, a process which may be central to other perceptual abilities that continue developing throughout childhood. This highlights the importance of effective reconciliation of signal and prediction for robust perception in both human and computational vision systems. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.