Lecture 2 Flashcards
(13 cards)
What are three words to describe infant’s looking behavior? What kind of stimuli do they pursue?
- Active (pursue looking), organized (pay attention to certain elements, have categories), and selective (pay attention to faces, unfamiliar things, certain things over other things)
- high contrast, curves, motion (they love faces!)
How does Fantz’s Preferential Looking Paradigm work? what does it test for? What are two examples of its use?
- infants view two simultaneous display, looking time at each display is measured, if one display is consistently looked at longer, they can discriminate between the two (and prefer one of them.)
- tests their acuity of discrimination, and preferential looking patterns
- The Bar-Haim studies on racial looking preferences in 3-month old infants,
How does the habituation/dishabituation paradigm work? What does it test for? What are two examples of its use?
- babies are shown the same display over and over again until they are habituated (attention diminishes), then they are shown something new, and their looking is measured - if they can tell the difference, they should look longer at it.
- tests what kind of perceptual categories babies are forming (color, gender, race, animals)
- color category experiment: after being habituated to a color blue at 480 wavelengths, do x-month old infants show more reaction to a new color that crosses the color boundary over another one with the same wavelength differences that is still in the same color boundary? answer is yes, shows they perceive colors in categories the way adults do, that their perception is organized
experiment where x-month old babies are habituated to face of a certain gender/race, then shown face of the same race, different gender. repeated with different race. shows whether they discriminate gender information cues between one race or another. results are that they are more able to read cues of their own race, for the most part.
How does infants vision change over the first year of life?
Starts out with babies eyes working well butter perceptual brain functions are immature and muscles for focusing are undeveloped, use active, selective and organized visual behavior to stimulate visual cortex of brain. 1 month old scans perimeters of objects, 2 month olds scan more broadly, looking at eyes and mouth. Babies are very sensitive to emotional information.
Describe an experiment that examined categorical speech perception in infants.
x-year old infants, dependent variable of sucking rate measured to determine dishabituation. Group one habituated to /ba/ sound and tested to /pa/ sound, group two habituated to /pa/ sound and tested to different /pa/ sound, same millisecond difference of voice onset time. as group 1. only group where stimulus crossed the category boundary line dishabituated - shows that infants distinguish phonemic sound categories the same way adults do.
How do babies perception of phonemic sound categories change over their first year of life?
babies are born being able to distinguish all sound categories across cultures, still can at 1 month. between 6-12 months, perceptual narrowing results in a diminished ability to discriminate.
According to Piaget’s theory of Cognitive Development, how do children revise theories about the world? How are his stages characterized?
- assimilation, new info brought into existing structure of thinking. accommodation, theory changes to fit new information.
- qualitative change (radical reorganization of the known structure) invariant sequence (can’t skip ahead, known order) and universal across all cultures
What are Piaget’s 4 stages?
- Sensorimotor period (0-2) all information is sensory and immediate, no past or future
- Preoperational period (2-7) capable of language, symbolism, thought about past and future, but lacking logic
- Concrete operational period (7-11) logical thought, operations, rules, strategies, but no abstract thought
- Formal operational period (11-adult) abstract hypothetical thought/scientific reasoning
What are three explanations for the A not B error, at least two studies?
Memory (they don't remember that object has been moved to B, they are practiced looking for it in A. if locations are very distinct, babies make less errors, and if delay between hiding and retrieval is increased, they do worse) Inhibitory control (unable to resist the practiced response. error occurs even though babies look to the correct hiding place) Social explanation (babies are sensitive to communicative symbols, might think researcher is playing a game. experiment with dogs and wolves)
How did Baillargeon test Piaget’s object permanence theory with the violation of expectation paradigm?
violation of expectation paradigm involved habituating babies to an event, showing two versions of an event: possible and impossible, and measuring looking time to see if babies possess the expectation of how it will occur and detect the violation of object permanence.
3 month olds are surprised by violations of object permanence. 3.5 olds cease to be surprised because they have developed theory (i.e. there are two Minnie mouses, or the ball is held up by the finger touching it) but if you debunk their theory, they are surprised again..
By eliminating the need for a motor response from a child, she demonstrated that Piaget was wrong about their knowledge of physical concepts in the world, which actually appear early and develop rapidly.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of children in the preoperational stage of development?
Strengths; symbolic thought like gesture and language, ability to think about past and future.
Weaknesses: logical thought - two main problems are centration (focusing on wrong part of the problem, failing conservation tasks) and egocentrism (difficulty taking other people’s perspective, visual/mental perspective taking. sally Anne task, three mountain task)
What is classical conditioning vs instrumental conditioning?
Classical conditioning involves an unconditioned stimulus/response and a conditioned stimulus/response…. example is how a baby will start sucking (UR) on a bottle when it is in their mouth (US), and eventually start sucking (CR) before bottle, at the sight of their caregiver (CS)
Instrumental conditioning involves learning the relationship between one’s behavior and consequences - one can get positive reinforcement for doing something good, for instance.
What is the difference between observational learning, rational learning, and active learning?
Observationa l learning is how kids imitate people, selectively, using cues to select which behaviors to imitate.
rational learning is when kids use prior experience to generate expectations about what will happen next.
active learning is how children learn more about an object when they are actively choosing what object to learn about… kids will investigate objects that behave in unexpected ways
