Lower level encoding: Holistic or nonselective?

Lower level encoding: Holistic or nonselective?

Two experimental procedures, discriminative learning and classification, reveal a monotonic increase between early childhood and young adulthood in the disposition to encode visual input selectively. This paper compares the capacity of two theories to explain this ontogeny. One theory cites perceptual differentiation as a major mechanism; the other cites transfer of control from a lower, analytic, nonselective encoding level to a higher, selective level. This essay supports the levels theory by showing how a model that assumes young children are disposed to encode analytically and nonselectively can (1) explain data heretofore considered as supporting the perceptual differentiation theory and (2) predict the outcome of two new critical experiments.