Action & Perception

Question 1

Sensation

Answer 1

Processing of basic information from the external world by the sensory receptors in sense organs and brain

Question 2

Perception

Answer 2

Process of organising and interpreting sensory information

Question 3

Babies and senses

Answer 3

Enter world with full sensory systems functioning to some degree and develops rapidly

Can perceive and differentiate a wide range of stimuli but narrows through exposure to specific information

Question 4

Vision

Answer 4

Use eyes to explore the world on arrival and pause when see a person or object

Question 5

The preferential looking technique

Answer 5

Method pioneered by Fantz (1961) for studying visual attention in infants that involved showing infants two patterns or two objects at a time to see if they have a preference for one over the other.

Modern versions incorporate eye trackers to get a more accurate result.

This method can also be used to measure habituation to a stimulus as infants prefer looking at new stimuli.

These methods show that infants can discriminate between different visual stimuli.

Question 6

Visual acuity and colour perception

Answer 6

Young infants have poor contrast sensitivity as they prefer pictures with high contrast

Have immature cone cells (20/120) - catch up by 8 months

Can’t perceive differences between colour and white until 2 months

Yang et al (2016) - infants categorise colour in same way as adults prior to language acquisition

Question 7

Visual scanning

Answer 7

Can’t track slow ,gong objects smoothly until 4 months

Question 8

Perceptual constancy

Answer 8

We perceive the world around us in a stable and constant way despite of physical differences in the retinal image of that object

Infants don’t have this - dont take into account distance etc

Question 9

Object segregation

Answer 9

the identification of boundaries between objects in the visual array

Motion is an important cue

Question 10

Kellman and Spelke (1983)

Answer 10

Habituated infants to moving image a then presenting them with either a full or broken rod and infants looked longer at the broken rod as this was a novel object – they had perceived the rod behind the box as whole. Infants that saw a stationary image looked at both rods equally which demonstrates the importance of common movement as a cue; however this does not develop until 2 months of age.

Question 11

Depth perception

Answer 11

Infants sensitive to optical expansion early on - cue for something approaching

Binocular disparity is the difference between the retinal image of an object in each eye that results in two slightly different signals being sent to the brain therefore as an object gets closer the disparity increases. Stereopsis is the process by which the visual cortex combines the differing neural signals caused by binocular disparity and results in the perception of depth which develops around 4 months of age (sensitive period before 3y)

By 6 /7 months infants begin to become sensitive to a variety of monocular depth cues known as pictorial cues, including interposition, convergence and relative size.

Question 12

Gibson and Walk (1960)

Answer 12

Visual cliff experiment- motor learning helped

Question 13

Auditory perception

Answer 13

Born with well developed system

Auditory localisation is perception of spatial location of origin of sound - babies turn towards sound

Question 14

Music perception

Answer 14

Pay more attention to consonant version of music than dissonant

Can make discriminations adults cannot

Question 15

Intermodal perception

Answer 15

Combing information from two or more sensory systems

Kaye and Bower (1994) - prevented newborns seeing a pacifier they sucked then showed them that and a different one - they looked longer at the one they sucked

Spelke (1976) - respond better to synchronous video and sound than asynchronous

Perceptual narrowing - lose ability to match facial movements and speech sounds of other languages

Question 16

The McGurk effect

Answer 16

An illusion that leads to perception in another modality e.g ba and fa vid

Infants look longer at congruent vids

Question 17

Reaching

Answer 17

Pre-reaching movements are clumsy swiping motions.

Needham, Barrett and Peterman (2002) gave pre-reaching infants Velcro mittens and toys allowing them to pick them up, this incaresed their interest in objects and allowed them to master reaching sooner. Months later they even showed more sophisticated patterns of object exploration than controls.

Question 18

Self locomotion

Answer 18

At 8 months gain ability to move themselves