Week 4 Flashcards by Luc King

sensing the environment.
Sensory receptors detect stimulus,
and receptor neurons convert it into
signals sent to the brain

Sensation

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the psychological process
of organizing and interpreting sensory
input

Perception

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Infants Are _______ Participants

Why?

“Difficult”

No or little command of language
* Do not understand (complex) instructions
* Do not give (complex) verbal responses

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Methods: studying infant perception

Preferential-looking tests
* Habituation-recovery tests
* Contingent reinforcement
Studies

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Present 2 stimuli, measure
attention to both
▪ What if infant looks longer at one
over the other stimulus?

Drawbacks?

Preferential-looking Tests

Vision only
▪ What about no preference?
▪ Longer looking ≠ preference
(e.g., surprising, pleasurable, puzzling)

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Robert Fantz’s (1960): looking chamber is an example of what form of studying infant perception

Preferential-looking Tests

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Present 1 stimulus until the infant
becomes “bored”
▪ Present a new stimulus
▪ What is the infant increase attention
to the new stimulus?
▪ Overt behaviour (looking time)
▪ Physiological measures (e.g., heart beats)

Habituation-Recovery Tests

Sense + discriminate stimuli
▪ Various sensory modalities

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Operant conditioning: following the “If you
do this, then you get that” principle
▪ Infants increase a specific behavior in
response to certain stimuli to obtain reward

Contingent Reinforcement

(Type of Operant conditioning based on specific action to reward, not overall operant conditioning)

E.g., infants’ sucking or head turning
behaviors in response to hearing their
mothers’ voice

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Early Controversies / Debates in Baby’s Perceptions

Nature vs. Nurture

Empiricists: (Nurture) infants must
learn to interpret sensations

Nativists: (Nature) innate basic
perceptual abilities

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perceptual development is the unfolding of the
natural differentiation

Differentiation Theory (Gibson, 1969, 1987, 1992)

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Cognitive schemes, knowledge, experiences form perceptual development

Enrichment Theory (Piaget, 1954, 1960)

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Least mature sense in
newborns, most studied in infant
perception

Vision

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Vision is not simply seeing. It
includes

actively looking
* tracking objects and people
* recognizing faces and so on

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the ability to see fine details (clearness and sharpness
of a visual image)

Visual acuity

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Newborn / Toddler seeing ability

Newborns: 20/600
* By 6 months: 20/100
* By 12 months: 20/50
* By 6 years: 20/20 (adult level)

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the minimum difference in brightness
between an image and its background that infants can
perceive. (gradually develop with biological maturation

Contrast sensitivity

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(Colour Perception)

Newborns see colours, but

2-month olds: some form of ______

By 4 months ________

Trouble distinguishing blue, green and yellow from white, especially
when equally bright

color vision

Perceive full range of colours,
– Discriminate among hues of the same colour category (e.g., green)
– Category color hues in line with adult named color categories
* Habituation: identical vs. same category vs. different category

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Visual Perception: Perceptual Constancy

Habituate to a cube (large or small), then show
both at different distances to form the same sized retina images.
Newborns look longer at the one of different size than the one they
were exposed earlier

This shows they perceive ____

Size constancy

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integrate elements to perceive a pattern

Do infants have this?

Pattern perception

Yes, Early preference for human faces and
moving rather than static stimuli

Subjective contour: Infants detect
static objects defined by illusory
contours at around 7 months

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(Object Perception)

a Gestalt principle with a natural tendency to view
objects or stimuli as continuous or whole

Good continuation

4 months: use “common movements” to perceive objects as whole (Kellman & Spelke, 1983)

Visual Perception: Depth Perception

Optical expansion (Kinetic cues, looming or approaching): 1-month

Stereopsis (binocular cues): 4-month (perceiving distance and 3 dimensions)

Pictorial (Monocular) cues: 6/7-month (Can understand 3d effects on a 2d paper or image)

Depth Perception: Visual Cliff

Gibson & Walk (1960)
* 2-month: detect the
difference (lower heart
rate on the deep side)
* 6.5-month: 90% Infants
crawled across the
shallow side but not the
deep side

Tracking motion

Newborns: move heads in response to moving
stimuli (Braddick & Atkinson, 2011)
– 2-month: from Jerky eye movements to
smooth tracking through 4 or 5 months (Aslin,
1981)
– 6-month: Anticipatory eye movements: 6
months (Johnson et al., 2003)
* Facilitates social interactions!

Face Perception

Young infants (0-2 month) view faces half of their
waking time (Jayaraman et al., 2015)
* Newborns prefer their mother’s face

Their visual system is biased to attend to a
socially significant stimulus!

Face Preference: babies may look at specific faces because of ___________

top-heavy features

(Contexts of Face Perception) A developmental process characterized by a diminished ability to distinguish among less frequently-encountered stimuli – Own-species/race/sex vs. other-species/race/sex

Perceptual narrowing Newborn – 6-month: – Can distinguish both humans and monkeys * After 6-month: – Can no longer distinguish between monkeys

Hearing in newborns is __________

Better developed than vision at birth, rapid development in absolute threshold in first year; not adultlike until past preschool years (5-8 years)

The minimum sound level of a stimulus required to detect a sound

Absolute threshold

The minimum difference in loudness or pitch needed to distinguish between two sounds

Relative threshold

(Music Perception) A biological foundation: _____

Newborn brains respond to variations in music (e.g., pitch, pitch changes, rhythm) Perceptual narrowing: * 4-month: prefer music of their own culture * 12-month: difficulty with foreign metrical structure, but not with familiar ones

Speech Perception

Listening preference (for socially significant stimuli) * Newborns: Speech > nonspeech; particularly mother’s voice * Newborns: human = animal vocalization * 3-month: species-specific (human > animal vocalization)

Newborns’ taste preference

‒ Sweet tooth ‒ Distinct facial expressions to bitter, sour, and sweet ‒ Contextual influences: mothers’ eating habits, early taste experiences

Newborns’ odor preference

React to unpleasant odors ‒Prefer milk to amniotic fluid ‒Recognize scent of mother (2-week old)

perceives and connects information available to multiple senses simultaneously

Intermodal perception

When different types of perceptual information occur at the same time, creating a unitary perceptual experience

Temporal synchrony Auditory – visual intermodal perception: 1-2 month (Aronson & Rosebloom, 1971) Early indicator of intelligence (Rose & Feldman, 1995)

Categorization of Infants sight and how they make meaning out of it

* Perceptual categories (7-month): physical appearance (e.g., birds = airplanes) * Conceptual categories (9- and 11-month): use/function (e.g., birds ≠ airplanes) 14-month: dissimilar exemplars (e.g., dog – fish; car – airplane) Categorize first based on visually salient features (e.g., shape), then conceptual criteria (e.g., what to do with it) (Mandler, 2004)

Piaget’s View of Children’s Nature in Cognitive Development

Constructivist Theory - Active child, discovery-based ▪ Schemas

Basic units of information that are cognitive representations of the world _______ determine how children of different ages organize and understand information

Schemas

Piagets Stages of Cognitive Development

1. Sensorimotor (0-2) 2. Preoperational (2-7) 3. Concrete Operational (7-12) 4. Formal Operations (12+) Distinct, hierarchical stages, each building on the previous one

Sensorimotor Sub-stages (Piaget Cognitive Development)

Stage 1. Reflexes and spontaneous movements (0-1 m) Involuntary actions (e.g., sucking, grasping, rhythmic actions) ▪ Stage 2. Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 ms) Repeat actions around the immediate environment of their bodies (e.g., repeatedly sucking thumbs and kicking legs) ▪ Stage 3. Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 ms) Repeating actions to have an effect on the external world (e.g., swiping a mobile) Stage 4. Coordination of Secondary Schemes (8-12 ms) “Goal-directed” intentional. Coordinate and combine actions to achieve a goal (e.g., lifting a pillow to retrieve a toy) ▪ Stage 5.Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 ms) Means-end analysis, trial-and-error experiments to explore new solutions ▪ Stage 6. Mental Representation: Symbolic Problem Solving (18-24 ms) Symbolic representations: hold and manipulate objects/events in minds

The knowledge that objects continue to exist independent of one’s immediate perceptual experiences (e.g., out of view). It appears at around 8 months.

Object permanence

The tendency to search where objects have been found before, rather than where they were last hidden

A-not-B error Infants make A-Not-B error around 8-12 months.

(Symbolic Mental Representation) the repetition/copying of other people’s behavior after a delay. It occurs around at around 18-24 months (Persisting mental representations)

Deferred imitation

(Symbolic Mental Representation) understand and use words to refer to things that are not present

Displaced Reference

use actions and words in a pretend mode (e.g., feeding a teddy bear)

Symbolic play

Challenges to Piaget’s Theory

Nativists: Piaget underestimated infants’ cognitive ability  Dynamic systems: Piaget’s emphasis on mental representation rather than in- the-moment contextual influences  Information-processing: Piaget’s qualitative, stage-like changes instead of gradual developmental changes

A looking technique based on a habituation and dishabituation procedure, that compares infant looking time at unexpected/impossible vs. expected/possible events

Violation-of-expectation paradigm Result: 3.5-5.5-month old infants looked longer at the impossible than possible events (object permanence)

The Violation-of-expectation paradigm is a ______ test of Object Permanence

Nativist Test

Dynamic Systems Insights in-the-moment contextual factors on cognitive performance: ________ Modifying the A-not-B Task: ________

Dynamic Systems View 1) increasing location A exposures; 2) disruption of motor habits (posture changes; weights on hands etc.