Exam 2 Flashcards
Sensation
Processing of basic information from the external world by receptors in the sense organs (eyes, ears, skin etc.)
Perception
Organizing and interpreting sensory information about the objects, events, and spatial layout of the world around us
What is Acuity; How is it tested
Acuity: Ability to see “fine detail”
Testing: Preferential looking
Preferential Looking
Testing: Two visual stimuli are displayed side by side, compares how long infants look at each stimuli
Proves: The infant can both discriminate between the two stimuli and the infant prefers one over the other
Habituation
Involves repeated presenting an infant with particular stimuli until the infant habituates (their response declines). Then a novel stimulus is presented, if the infant dis habituates in response to the novel stimulus, the researcher infers that the infant can discriminate between old and new stimuli
Early Limitations
-Preference for High Contrast (due to size, space, and shaping of cones)
-Poor Color Vision (preferring red and blue)
-Visual Scanning (short jerky movements)
Pattern Perception
Prefer Mom’s face after only 12 hours
No initial preferences for particle face expression but by 9-12 months prefer smiling over angry (infants like attractive faces)
Perceptual Constancy & Size Constancy
Objects appear to maintain shape and size despite constant changes in retinal image, infants have size consistency by 1 month
Object Segregation
Knowing where one object ends and another begins
Cues: color, shape, texture, gaps, motion
Intermodal Perception
Integrating input from two or more sensory systems
Components of Language
-Phonemes: Learning the sound system of language (“beer” vs “deer)
-Morphemes: Learning the meanings of words (“cats” vs “cats”)
-Syntax: Learning the rules for combining words (grammar
dog bites man” vs “man bites dog)
Brain Areas Associated with Language
-Broca: Speech production, controls speech muscles via motor cortex
-Wernicke: Speech ‘sense’, interprets auditory code
Gene Case
Case: From the age of 18 months to 13 years old her parents kept her locked up in a room alone, her development was stunted (physically, metrically, and emotionally), her language never developed much beyond a toddler’s
Theory suggest developmental changes in the plasticity of language-related regions of the brain and motivational differences across age
Second Language Learning
Younger = More hemispheric localization
Cerebral organization differs depending on when 2nd language is learned
Discrimination of Non-Native Phonemes (Janet Werker)
By 12 months infants become less sensitive to the differences between nonnative speech sounds. Werker tested English speaking infants on their ability to discriminate speech, the infants turned their heads toward the sound source when they hear a change in sounds.
Prosody
The characteristic rhythmic and intonation patterns with which a language is spoken
(basics for very early learning, large reason for why languages sound so different)
Babbling
Strings of consonant-vowel syllables drawn from a fairly limited set of sounds
(begins between 6-10 months)
Quine’s Problem
An infinate number of hypotheses about word meanings are possible given the input the child has.
“Gavagai”
Does it refer to Something
Factors that Aid in Word Learning
-Adult Influences: quality of taking and name games
-Children’s Contributions: pragmatic cues (social context), syntactic bootstrapping (figuring out new meanings of words by using grammatical structure of the sentences)
Daul Representation
Young children have substantial difficulty treating an object both as itself and as a representation of something else
Pictures (2D)
Young children treat pictured objects as if they can be grasped, they think the object is real
Stops at about 2.5 years
Scale Error (3D)
Toddlers can make the mistake of treating many tiny replicas as the real thing
Hard to see objects as symbols, dual representation is hard, hard to preform on tasks
Drawings
When young children first start making marks on paper their focus is almost exclusively on the activity with no attempt to produce recognizable images, at about 3-4 years children begin trying to draw pictures of something
Quinn & Eilmas
Tested 3-4 month olds ability to distinguish between cats and dogs
Found that even infants form categories
Concept
General ideas or understandings that can be used to group together similar things, helps us simplify the world and think more efficiently
Object Hierarchies
Superordinate - very specific
Subordinate - medium or in-between
Basic - first learned
(plant - tree - oak)
Inheritance
3-4 year olds know that physical characteristics tend to be passed on from parent to offspring
Essentialism
The view that living things have an essence inside them that makes them what they are
Counting Principles
-One to One Correspondence
-Stable Order
-Cardinality
-Order Irrelevance
-Abstraction
Recognizing Goal Directed Behavior
The understanding that desires lead to actions is firmly established by 2 years
Why are False-Belief Tasks Hard
Description: Another person believes something to be true that the child knows is false, the question is whether the child thinks that the other person will act in accord with his or her false belief or the child’s correct understanding of the situation
Challenge: Depends on whether children understand that other people’s actions are determined by the contents of their own minds rather than be the object truth of the situation
When is Success Seen in False Belief Tasks
Quite a few children around 3 years old will succeed if the task is presented in a manner that facilitates understanding (if they tell the child that the two of them are going to play a trick on another child, they will correctly predict that the other child will say the box contains smarties)
Numerical Equality
The idea that all sets of N objects have something in common “twoness”
Egocentric Encoding of Space
The locations of objects are coded relative to the infants’ position at the time of coding
Trouble Understanding Plants are Alive
Plants grow and heal themselves like all other living things but they do it very slowly which is hard for a young child to realize.
Children have a shallow and fragmented understanding and they simultaneously possess both mature and immature biological understanding.
Mandler & McDonough
Very young children’s basic categories do not always match those of adults. For examples, rather than forming separate categories of cars, motorcycles, and buses, young children seem to group these objects into one category of “objects with wheels”
Perceptual Categories
The grouping of objects that have somewhat similar appearances
Telegraphic Speech
Short (two-word) utterances that leave out non-essential words
What Words Are Learned Most Early On
Nouns. Early words often refer to family members, pets, and important objects
Speech Stream
Infants use predictable sound patterns to fish out words of the passing stream of speech. This ability appears to be available at the youngest age tested, just days after birth.
Overregulazation Errors
Treat irregular forms as if they were regular (‘went’ vs ‘goed’)
Which Side of the Brian is Language Localized for Right-Handed People
Left
“Species-Specific”
Only humans acquire language in the normal course of development
“Species-Universal”
Language learning is achieve by typically developing children across the globe
Generativity
Using a finite set of words and our knowledge of the systematic ways in which those word can be combined, we can generate an infinite number of senesces, expressing an infinite number of ideas
