2: Infant Cognition

Question 1

What is self regulation and what has to do with it?

Answer 1

Self regulation is maintaining a srable/desirable internal state by modulating affect, behaviour and cognition.

Question 2

Why study infant cognition?

Answer 2

Because early development lays the foundation for later life outcomes, like early trauma, malnutrition, self-regulation.
- Babies learn a lot quite quickly

Question 3

When do babies learn at what times they have to sleep?

Answer 3

At +- 12 months, they sleep at night and take naps, but are awake for longer periods

Question 4

What are things we can and want to study in infants?

Answer 4

• Attention > eye movements

- How do they learn?

Question 5

How can we study infants?

Answer 5

From year 1: standardized tests

Question 6

What are downsides of standardized tests?

Answer 6

• CUmbersome, time-consuming
• Requires much training
• Parent measures are not measuring the infant
• Sometimes not very reliable

Question 7

How does the visual preference method work?

Answer 7

• Assumption: longer looking time means preference/interest and being able to distinguish stimuli
• Looking times can be used to study the development of perceptual and cognitive abilities

Question 8

How does habituation-dishabituation work?

Answer 8

• Repeated presentation of the same stimulus, when looking time decreases = habituation
• Looking time increases again upon presentation of a new stimulus = dishabituation

Question 9

Why is looking behavior so important?

Answer 9

• It’s available to infants very early on, almost completely before 3 months (and under control)
• Seen as a measure of attention

Question 10

How does eye-tracking work?

Answer 10

• Use a light to illuminate the eye
• Use a camera to film the eye
• Use an algorithm to detect the corneal reflection, the iris and determine the eye gaze position
• Fixations: relatively stable position
• Saccade: fast movement to a new location

Question 11

What are stages of infant attention development?

Answer 11

1. alertness, wake-sleep cycles
2. spatial orienting: becoming aware of space
3. object attention
4. endogenous control

Question 12

What are the results of studing difference in looking time?

Answer 12

When given more time, long lookers are able to discriminate in the featural task.
When gives less time, they break down in the global task
- Short lookers have more efficient information processing abilities than long lookers

Question 13

What causes the difference in looking time?

Answer 13

Two hypotheses:

1. short vs long looking is related with a shift from global to local attention
2. short vs long looking is related to overall processing speed

Question 14

What have we learnt from visual preference method?

Answer 14

Infants show systematic preferences for faces, complex and new stimuli

Question 15

What is free viewing?

Answer 15

sit back and relax, view pictures for 8 seconds each

Question 16

What are some findings of free viewing?

Answer 16

With age:

• fixation durations decrease
• saccade amplitudes decrease

Question 17

What are the results of the Geeraerst study?

Answer 17

Eye movements are one of the first behaviours that come under voluntary control of the infant