Infant perceptual & Motor development Flashcards
Vision (perceptual development)
- least developed sense at birth
- 6 months, Acuity approximates normal adult vision
- 8months, more interested in tiny objects
- newborns prefer colour to grey
- 2-4 months, see full colour spectrum
Pattern Perception - Looking Method
Looking chamber Fantz (1961)
Paired stimuli Fantz & Nevis (1967), baby lies flat and presented with paired stimuli. Comparing two stimuli.
Looks at where the baby is looking, new stimuli baby finds interesting. Old stimuli baby finds boring. Is baby shifting attention.
Pattern Perception Example
- New born: prefer patterns to plain stimuli
- 2 mo: Prefer more complex patterns to simpler ones
What is visual scanning
- Eye tracking method
- Prefer high - contrast areas
- 1 month can see Edges, 2 months internal features
- Sticky fixation: difficulty disengaging visual attention away from one feature to focus on another
- 6 month, adult like planning.
Maurer & Salapatek (1976)
Cohen & Younger, 1983
Rose et al, 1997
- Perceiving parts vs. wholes
- can see whole shape not just edges and corners
- Improves over 1st year
- 4 months, see contours
12 months, recognise incomplete line drawings
What is Habituation
A form of learning reflected in a decrease in the strength of response to a repeated stimulus.
Face perception (Johnson et al, 1991)
Nature: newborns track faces more than other stimuli
Nurture: Bias gives them experience with faces
2-4 months prefer mothers face and discriminate individual face
What is depth perception, Kinetic cues
- create depth perception (1 month old)
- Motion parallax, nearby objects appear to move faster than distant ones
What is depth perception, Binocular cues
- taken in two eyes to help see depth (3-5months)
- Disparity: Brain perceives depth when combining slightly different angle from each eye
What is depth perception, Pictorial cues
- 5-7 months
- Interposition: An object that overlaps another appears nearer (Granrud & Yonas, 1984)
- Linear perspective: Parallel lines appear to converge in distance (Arterberry et al, 1991)
Visual Cliff (Gibson & Walk, 1960)
When the mother is on the other side smiling, they crawl across the cliff rather than when the mother has a scared expression.
Humans: more crawling experience and more avoidance of the clidd than different species
Auditory threshold (Aslin et al, 1998)
- the quietest sound they can hear is the auditory threshold
- New borns less sensitive to noise than adults
- Most sensitive to sounds in range of speech
Localisation (Clifton, 1992)
- Newborns turn head towards sound
- 2 year is adult like
Do new borns like music?
- Trainor & Heinmiller, 1998 found that newborns prefer music to non melodic sounds
- At 6 months babies can distinguish between Western and non western music scales
Speech (DeCasper & Spence, 1986)
- new borns such preferntially to hear
- prefer voice of mother vs stranger
- can recognise a rhyme from the last 6 weeks of pregnancy
