DEV PSYC - INFANT COG

Question 1

Discuss touch in infant cognition:

Answer 1

Different receptor channels providing information about:

• pressure
• temperature
• pain
• limb position

Newborns and even preterm babies can extract and remember information about object shape with their hands alone (Marcus, Lejeune, Berne-Audéoud, Gentaz, & Debillon, 2012).

Question 2

Discuss the different respinses to the different types of touch:

Answer 2

• positive reaction to gentle stroking
• negative reaction to sudden changes in temperature or texture and to uncomfortable pressure on the body

Question 3

Discuss pain in in infant cognition:

Answer 3

• receptors for pain in the skin are just as plentiful in infants as they are in adults
• higher levels of plasma cortisol after circumcision than before surgery (gunner et al., 1985)
• FMRI - Most brain regions that respond to painful stimuli in adults are activated by painful stimuli in newborns (Goksan et al., 2015)

Question 4

Can infants hear as well as adults?

Answer 4

No

• The quietest sound a newborn responds to is about 4 times louder than the quietest sound an adult responds to (Hecox & Deegan, 1985).
• Infants are less sensitive to low-pitched sounds relative to higher frequencies (Saffran et al., 2006).

Question 5

What is the least mature sense at birth

Answer 5

• Newborn visual acuity is 20/200 to 20/400
• this is defined as legal blindness in adults
• by 4-5 years of age the infants visual activity is at adult levels

Question 6

How do infants percieve the world?

Answer 6

• visual preferences (Frantz, 1961)
• form and shape perception
• size constancy
• object continuity and cohesion
• depth perception (Gibson & Walk’s, 1960)
• face processing (Johnson et al, 1991)
• perceiving faces (Maurer & Salapatek, 1976)

Question 7

What is perceptual categorisation?

Answer 7

he neural bridge between lower-level sensory and higher-level language processing. … Perceptual categorization is fundamental to the brain’s remarkable ability to process large amounts of sensory information and efficiently recognize objects including speech.

Question 8

Explain Categorisation (Slater 1989)

Answer 8

• participants: 3-5 months old
• stimuli: different geometrical shapes
• procedure: familiarisation with one category, then testing with an exemplar of the same category or a novel one
• results: infants showed a preference for the novel category item

Question 9

What is object permanence?

Answer 9

Piaget

• Knowledge that objects exist, independent of our perception of them
• infants younger than 8 months do not search for an object that is occluded, even though this is done in full view of the infant

At 8 months, infants will recieve a completely hidden toy

Question 10

What is object permanence:

Answer 10

Object permanence involves understanding that items and people still exist even when you can’t see or hear them. This concept was discovered by child psychologist Jean Piaget and is an important milestone in a baby’s brain development.

Question 11

What is the defenition of Numerosity

Answer 11

• the ability to determine the number of items in a set without counting

Question 12

What is the defenition of Ordinality?

Answer 12

• a basic understanding of more than or less than

Question 13

What is Webner’s Law

Answer 13

“as numerosity increases, the variance in subjects’ representations of numerosity increases proportionately, and therefore discriminability between distinct numerosities depends on their difference ratio”

Question 14

Core knowledge:

Answer 14

• infants possess core knowledge
• they are born with a small set of distinct systems of knowledge that have been shaped by natural selection and upon which new skills and beliefs systems are built