Chapter 5 - Seeing, Thinking, and doing in infancy Flashcards
Whats the difference between sensation and perception?
Sensation - things felt/ sensed through our senses
Perception - how/ what we make of sense of what we’ve sensed
What are the primary methods for studying infants’ vision?
habituation and potential looking technique?
What is the potential looking technique?
- show infant 2 pictures or toys to look at or interact with
- whichever one they look at longer indicates preference or surprise
What is habituation? how is it used as an experimental technique?
- repeated exposure to something (ex: a bell)
- initially, infant is excited; looking time decreases w/ repeated exposure
- introduction of new stimuli, looking time increases again
Describe visual acuity
- involves the sharpness of visual discrimination
- estimated by comparing how long infants look at research patterns
What type of patterns do babies generally prefer to look at? Why?
- patterns with high visual contrast
b/c…
- babies have poor visual contrast
- cones in their eyes differ from adults’ in size, shape, and concentration
Do newborns visually scan faces the same way adults do?
- no, they usually just scan the contour of the face/ head, while adults scan the central facial features
- after 2 months, babies scan faces like adults do
What is the other race effect (ORE)? What is it driven by?
- the ability to easily distinguish visual/ facial features between people of the same race as us
- driven by access of facial features in individual after 9 months
What is object segregation?
the identification of separate objects in a visual array (perceptions of boundaries between objects)
What are some experimental findings about infants and object segregation?
After habituation, like adults, babies assumed there was a single rod moving behind the block (indicated with longer gaze at broken rod)
How do infants use depth perception?
they use depth and distance cues to navigate their environment
(ducking and blinking indicate awareness of things coming at them)
What is optical expansion?
the knowledge of the idea that things look bigger when closer and smaller when father
Describe the Visual Cliff Research
- observed depth perception in babies
- illustrated the interdependence of different domains of development
How well developed is human auditory perception at birth? How long does it take to fully develop?
- relatively well developed at birth
- not fully developed until ages 5 or 6
What is auditory localization?
the tendency for newborns to turn towards sounds
