Developmental Lecture 2: Perceptual Development and Methodology Flashcards
Inter-sensory integration
Infants begin to integrate information from several senses
Cross-modal transfer
Infants can perceive something via one modality & transfer the information to another modality
Meltzof & Borton (4)
- 1979
- Infants approx 29 days old
- 2 dummies, one smooth the other bumpy
- 71% looked longer at the dummy they were sucking
Challenges to testing infant abilities (5)
- Linguistic abilities
- Concentration
- Crying
- Sleeping
- Ethical and consensual access
Non-Nutritive Sucking (NNS) (3)
- Method of auditory perception
- Nazzi et al. 1998
- Infant sucking rate indicates the ability to discriminate between ‘pitch contours’
Brain responses (3)
- Method of auditory perception
- Winkler et al. 2003
- Similarly to adults, newborn infants segregate concurrent streams of sound, allowing them to organise auditory input
Visual acuity
The ability to see fine-grained detail
Method of preferential looking (3)
- Based on infants’ spontaneous looking preference
- Not asking the infant to specifically look in one direction
- Seeing where their preferences lie in order to learn about their abilities, preferences, discriminations
Why is visual acuity poor at birth?
There is an under developed visual cortex
Contrasts
Infants are only sensitive to a small reaction of the pattern information available to adults, therefore they prefer to look at images with high contrast
Pareidolia
A psychological phenomenon involving a stimulus that the mind perceives a familiar pattern where none actually exists
Structural hypothesis
The neonate brain contains innate information concerning the structure of faces
Sensory hypothesis
Classes of stimuli are preferred as a result of their general properties
CONSPEC
A visual perceptual ‘device’ available at birth with no prior experience necessary
CONSPEC
A visual perceptual ‘device’ available at birth with no prior experience necessary
