Figure 2

Results. (a) Experiment 1: Children and older adults performed poorly overall relative to young adults. While younger and older adults exhibited sensitivity to structural information with better performance for trials in which the first object was a possible object, children did not show this effect. Trial type (same/different) did not interact with first object type and, therefore, the graph is collapsed across this factor. (b) Experiment 2: Children and older adults, performed poorly relative to young adults. In contrast with Experiment 1, all groups were sensitive to structural information with better performance for possible than impossible objects. (c) Children and older adults performed poorly overall relative to young adults. All groups exhibited similar performance for possible and impossible objects. Note that the analyses were conducted on transformed data (see Methods for details) but that, for the sake of clarity, data are presented in raw units. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean for each condition and asterisks indicate significant difference between the two object categories.