Chapter 5: What Do Infants Know and When and How Do They Know It? Flashcards
In research with infants, observing the amount of time infants spend looking at different visual stimuli to determine which one they prefer (look at more often); such as preferences indicate an ability to discriminate between stimuli
Visual Preference Paradigm
Decrease in the response to a stimulus that has been presented repeatedly
Habituation
The tendency to show renewed interest in a stimulus when some features of it have been changed
Dishabituation
The process of adjusting the lens of the eye to focus on objects at different distances
Accommodation (of the lens)
The ability to follow a moving object with one’s eyes
Visual Tracking
The ability of both eyes to focus together on the same object, which is necessary for depth perception
Binocular Convergence
The ability to see something sharply and clearly
Visual Acuity
The ability to discriminate visual patterns denoting depth
Depth Perception
Information about depth of objects associated with the movement of objects we are watching
Kinetic Cues
The ability to integrate the images provided by each eye into a single, richer one
Stereoscopic (or binocular) vision
Cues used to understand visual perspective; such as cues permit the perception of three dimensions from a two-dimensional target, as in a picture or a painting
Monocular (or pictorial) cues
The tendency of young infants ( 1 month olds) to direct their attention primarily to the outside of a figure and to spend little time inspecting internal features
Externality effect
Individual sounds that are used to make up words
Phonemes
The ability to associate and interconnect information provided by different senses about a certain experience
Intermodel perception
Based on habituation/dishabituation procedures, techniques in which increases in infants’ looking time at impossible events are interpreted as reflecting a violation of what they are expected to see
Violation-of-expectation
Conditioning procedures used in memory research with infants, in which children’s behaviors, for example, kicking, control aspects of a visual display
Conjugate reinforcement procedure
Imitation of a modeled act some time after viewing the behavior. Deferred imitation is a reflection of memory
Deferred Imitation
The process of treating different objects as members of the same category
Categorization
The central tendency, “best example,”of a cognitive category
Category prototype
Expression used by some infant researchers to refer to the set of knowledge that young infants possess in certain domains, including objects, people and social relations, numbers and quantities and geometry
Core Knowledge
The knowledge that an object remains the same despite changes in how it is viewed (i.e from a different perspective or distance
Object constancy
The knowledge that objects have an existence in time and space independent of on’s own perception or action on those objects
Object Permanence
The knowledge that objects are cohesive entities and move continuously through space
Object Continuity and Cohesion
Objects permanence task, in which the infant has to retrieve a hidden object at one location (B), after having retrieved it several times previously from another one (A)
A-not-B task
An object permanence task in which an object is hidden first in one container and then under another container out of the sight of the observer. Infants typically pass this task around 18 months
Invisible Displacement
The ability of newborns to reproduce some specific behaviors, such as certain facial expressions, that they have seen in others
Neonatal Imitation
The ability to determine quickly the number of items in a set without counting
Numerosity
A basic understanding of more than and less than relationships
Ordinality
Part of the hippocampus that continues to develop after birth and plays an important role in memory
Dentate Gyrus
