Week 4 Flashcards
(54 cards)
What aspects of our perceptual abilities develop by necessity?
- Orientational adjustment of the hands to appropriate target (4.5 months)
- Preparation of grasp aperture to match the size of a target prior to contact (9 months)
What are the philosophical positions in developmental psychology?
Arguments about whether we get knowledge and perception of the world from experience or a priori knowledge
What is the difference between the epistemological debate and the ontological debate?
Epistemology: where does knowledge/ideas come from?
Ontology: what the nature of reality is?
What are empiricist and nativist positions?
Empiricism = newborn infant is naive about the physical world
Nativism = young babies are able to perceive and think about the world in sophisticated ways
Describe Piaget’s constructionism
4 months:
Intellectual revolution (where infant takes a big step to change how they act with objects)
He argues - reciprocal organisation of sensorimotor schemas -> objective representations
What is Differentiation and Integration?
Comes from ontological position
Both characterise perceptual development as a process in which we:
1. Learn to link perceptual features together to perceive objects/events/people (initiation)
2. Initially fuse features together two perceive whole objects, but gradually learn to differentiate objects and features at finer levels (differentiation)
What does amodal mean?
You perceive the world in large proportions - properties of sensory stimulation that may be independent of the particular sensory that you are receiving
Describe the differentiation account of perceptual development
[Eleanor Gibson and James Gibson]
- early ability to perceive objects, configurations
- also been applied to amodal properties
What was Piaget’s clinical method to study perceptual development?
“clinical methods”
presented problems for his children to solve and then increased the complexity of these problems in order to probe the exact nature of their competence
-ve: just observations, only represent his 3 children, open to bias
Describe the visual preference task
[Robert Fantz,1960s]
Record the amount of times babies look at objects = can gather data on infant preferences (demonstrates they can distinguish one stimulus from another)
State limitations of the behavioural methods of measuring perceptual development
- Looking might not always be the best way to measure perceptual competence (don’t know what ‘looking longer’ actually means)
- Behaviour in babies (including eye movements) = often noisy and doesn’t produce the best data
- Behaviour competence may be poor and mask perceptual and cognitive competence
- Behavioural responses to sensory stimuli sit at the end of a neural processing stream
- Experimenter bias = plays substantial role in driving certain behavioural measures in young infants
What are marker tasks?
Behavioural tasks which we know are subserved by specific brain regions
Improvements at the task may reflect changes in the functionality of the underlying brain structures
Evaluate marker tasks
+) Useful given that it is often difficult to use imaging methods with infants
-) Because we are measuring behaviour, it may mask some of the neural processes
What are the similarities and differences between adult and infant EEG studies?
Similarities:
- low spatial res and greater temporal res
Differences:
- difficult to collect as many trials
- difficult to control movement artefacts
- often more expensive
How do fNIRS work?
Measure blood oxygenation via infrared light (which bone and tissue are transparent too), but haemoglobin absorbs infrared light
- Amt of light that makes it back to the detector = used to calculate the amount of oxygenated blood
What is the difference between fMRI and fNIR?
fNIR’s are not as spatially precise, less invasive and resilient to movement and can tell us more than an EEG about where the brain activity actually is
Why do we use brain imaging with infants?
- Can help with disagreements about how we should interpret infant behaviour
- Can help get earlier stages of cognitive processing > may be masked if we are just relying on behaviour
- Development happens in the brain = may help guys get closer to understanding developmental processes
Name 3 visual preferences that infants have at a week old
[Fantz, 1961]
- bulls eye figures over striped figures
- checkerboard figure over plain square figure
- schematic faces over almost any other stimulus
Describe the Looking Time Revolution
[Fantz, 1961]
Looking behaviour has been most fruitful way of investigating visual perception in infants
Do babies perceive form/objects like us?
- They can discriminate shape, but do it in lots of ways e.g. contour density
- Perceive the lightness and surface reflectance properties of objects very differently to adults
What is fixed trial familiarisation? What is Slater (1991) take on this?
Desensitising infants to certain aspects of forms
Slater: desensitised newborns to orientation and found they could discriminate shapes on basis of angular configuration, size and shape in the first days of life
How does object permanence help us understand infants visual perception?
Habituated 4 month olds = looking preference for broken rod over complete rod
Spelke (1998) = evidence for innate understanding that common motion signifies that the object is unified behind the occluder
What does violation of expectation show us about infants visual perception?
3-5 month olds look longer at impossible events, despite perceptual familiarity -> shows early knowledge and expectations of permanence and solidity
6 months = striking neglect of objects once hidden [Piaget]
What is the Core Knowledge Account?
[Spelke]
Innate neural systems which provide us with core knowledge about the world, e.g. numerosity, object permanence and solidity
