Perception and Motor Development in Infancy

Question 1

What methods are used to study infants?

Answer 1

• preferential-looking technique

- habituation

Question 2

What typical infant behavior is utilized in the preferential-looking technique?

Answer 2

• infants looking longer at things they find interesting or rewarding
• interest in novelty

Question 3

What is the habituation paradigm and how does it assess infants’ perception during infancy?

Answer 3

• involves repeatedly presenting an infant with a given stimulus until the response decline s
• in infant’s response increases when a novel stimulus is presented, we can infer that the baby can discriminate btw the old and new stimuli

Question 4

When does habituation occur? What causes dishabituation?

Answer 4

• habituation: occurs when we learn not to respond to a stimulus that is presented repeatedly without change, punishment, or reward.
• dishabituation: occurs when we respond to an old stimulus as if it were new again

Question 5

Are newborn babies able to smell, taste, and hear?*

Answer 5

• Newborns can taste and smell and will favor sweet tastes over bitter ones. For example, a newborn will choose to suck on a bottle of sweetened water, but will turn away or cry if given something bitter or sour to taste.
• Likewise, newborns will turn toward smells they favor and turn away from bad odors

– Taste preference develops over the years

• at birth babies can hear basic frequencies, however, they cannot hear high or low frequencies

– it may take up to 6 months until babies can hear and understand a range of sounds

Question 6

When do infants reach adult-like visual acuity?

Answer 6

It approaches that of adults by age 8 months and reaches full adult acuity by 6 years of age

Question 7

Why do young infants prefer to look at high contrast patterns versus low contrast patterns? What does this say about their visual acuity?

Answer 7

because they have poor contrast sensitivity

-need more contrast btw dark and light to see the difference

Question 8

How could an infant’s visual acuity be tested using the preferential-looking task?

Answer 8

-can be estimated by comparing how long the baby looks at a striped pattern vs a plain gray square

Question 9

How do young infants perceive objects?

Answer 9

• Newborns perfer geometrical, non face like stimuli with more elements in the upper part over stimuli in which more elements are in the lower part
• babies like top heavy diagrams/faces

Question 10

Why are faces more important than other objects?

Answer 10

• Babies prefer faces that they’ve seen before and from birth
• infants are drawn to faces; from paying attention to real faces, the infant comes to recognize and prefer his or her own mother’s face after about only 12 cumulative hours of exposure

Question 11

What are the two positions in the ongoing debate of infant face processing?

Answer 11

• a neural domain specific for face recognition is innate, present at birth, and does not develop
• face recognition is based on experience and takes over months and years to develop & be specialize

Question 12

What does it mean that ‘face processing’ is a domain specific ‘module’ that is innate and does not develop from environmental interactions? *

Answer 12

• It means that there is a region in the brain SPECIFIC to face processing
• It is innate, it does not develop it is always present.
• The ability to recognize faces is present at birth
• Hypothesis: neural architecture for face recognition is present at birth

Question 13

How does the following view differ from the first: face processing is experience-expectant and activity dependent ability? *

Answer 13

• Baby is born with neural structure that would make it likely that they would recognize faces
• But since faces are interesting babies pay a lot of attention to them, leading to a development of face recognition capacity

Question 14

What are the findings of the Pascalis et a. study and how do the relate to the debate? *

Answer 14

over the first year infants fine-tune their prototype of a face so that it reflects faces that are familiar in their environments

Question 15

Do infants perceive object segregation in visual displays?

Answer 15

-yes, but only if the object behind is moving

Question 16

What is perceptual constancy?

Answer 16

The perception of object as being of constant size, shape, color, etc., in spite of physical differences in the retinal image of the object

Question 17

How does motion impact perceptual constancy (Wood & Wood, 2018)

Answer 17

newborn chicks require smooth movement to identify objects

Question 18

How is depth perception assessed in infancy?

Answer 18

• visual expansion

- retinal disparity

Question 19

What visual cues influence depth perception, and at what ages do these cues become useful?

Answer 19

• At about 6-7 months of age, infants become sensitive to a variety of the perceptual cues of depth that can be achieved by one eye alone
• E.g., size and interposition

Question 20

How does motor development affect depth perception?

Answer 20

-depending on the baby being a novice crawler vs an experienced crawler

Question 21

What is attention and how does it influence perception?*

Answer 21

processes that allow people to control input from the environment and regulate behavior

-attentional processes serve the turner function in filtering information selectively for further processing that finally leads to perception

Question 22

What symptoms characterize attention-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)?*

Answer 22

• overactivity
• inattention
• impulsivity
• problems w/ academic performance, getting along w/ peers

Question 23

what are risk factors for ADHD?*

Answer 23

• genes put some children at risk for ADHD by affecting the alerting & executive networks of attention and the brain structures that support those networks
• prenatal exposure to alcohol & other drugs