Exam 2 (Ch 5-8) Flashcards
Define: Sensation
The processing of basic info from the external world by the sensory receptors in the sense organs and brain.
Define: Brain
The process of organizing and interpreting sensory info about the objects, events, and spatial layout of our surrounding world.
What are 2 ways of studying visual perception?
- Preferential-looking Technique
2. Habituation
Define: Preferential-Looking Technique
- Show infants 2 patterns or 2 objects at a time to see if the infants have a preference for one over the other
- a technique to study visual perception/visual acquity
Define: Habituation
- Repeatedly presenting an infant with a given stimulus until the response declines
- *if infant’s response increases when a novel stimulus is presented, the researcher infers that the baby can discriminate between the old and new stimuli
- a technique to study visual percerption
Why do infants prefer to look at patterns of high visual contrast?
Because infants have poor contrast sensitivity due to the different cone size, shape, and spacing in the eye that infants have from adults (infant cones only catch 2% of incoming light while adults’ catch 65%)
Define: Contrast Sensitivity
The ability to detect differences in light and dark areas in a visual pattern.
Define: Visual Acquity
How well someone can see.
Define: Cones
The light sensitive neurons that are highly concentrated in the fovea
-Role: to process color info and fine detail
Define: Fovea
The central region of the retina
Compare how a 1 month old vs a 2 month old A) visually scans and B) visually tracks an object.
SCANNING:
1 month old: scan perimeters of shapes
2 month old: scans perimeters AND interiors of shapes
TRACKING:
1 and 2 month old: cannot follow object’s path smoothly, is jerky
-it’s not until 3 months of age that infants can track an object SMOOTHLY (no jerky movements)
From birth, infants are drawn to faces. What are some possible explanations for this?
- General bias towards configurations with more elements in the upper half than in the lower half
- By looking at real faces, infant comes to recognize and prefer its own mother’s face after 12 cumulative hours of exposure
- Infant will come to understand the significance of dif facial expressions
How are infants affected by attractive faces?
- Infants will look at faces seen as more attractive for longer
- Infants interact more positively with people with attractive faces
Define: Subjective Contour
Visual illusion that evoke the perception of an edge without the aid of a luminance or color change across the edge.
Define: Perceptual Constancy/Size Constancy
The perception of objects being of constant size, shape, color, etc., in spite of physical differences in the retinal image of the object
-present in both infants and adults
What is the empiricists’ stance on the origin of perceptual constancy?
It develops as a function of experience.
What is the nativists’ stance on the origin of perceptual constancy?
It comes from the inherent properties of the nervous system.
How could you determine if an infant had mastered perceptual/size constancy?
If, when the infant is present with 2 cubes at different distances with the larger cube being farther away, infant will stare longer at the larger cube farther away.
How do infants segregate objects compared to adults?
Infants: use COMMON movement to perceive object segregation (ex. if two separate objects move together at the same time, velocity, and direction, infant will perceive these 2 objects as being 1 whole)
Adults: use general knowledge about the world to perceive object segregation
Define: Optical Expansion
A depth cue in which an object blocks increasingly more of the background–>indicating that the object is approaching.
Define: Binocular Disparity
Difference in object location seen by the right vs the left eye.
-Used by the brain to calculate depth information regarding the object.
Define: Stereopsis
-When does this develop in infants?
Brain’s process for calculating the degree of disparity between the eyes’ differing neural signals and produces the perception of depth.
-Emerges suddenly at 4 months
Define: Object Segregation
The ability to identify separate objects within a visual array.
Define: Monocular Cues
-When does this develop in infants?
A depth cue that needs only 1 eye to be perceived.
-Develops at 6-7 months
Define: Pictorial Cues
-When does this develop in infants?
- Used to portray depth in pictures/paintings
- Also only needs 1 eye to be perceived
-Develops at 6-7 months
Up until what age do children continue to treat pictures (2D objects) as though they were real objects (3D objects)?
19 months.
Define: Auditory Localization
Perception of the location in space of a sound source
-Newborns already have this skill–will turn head towards source of sound
When does the sensitivity to taste and smell develop?
Develops before birth.
Define: Intermodal Perception
The combining of info from 2 or more sensory systems.
-Present from very early in life
Define: Neonatal Reflexes
Tightly organized patterns of action present in a newborn
Give 5 examples of neonatal reflexes.
- Grasping: closing fingers around anything that presses against the palm of their hand
- Rooting: turning their head in the direction of touch and opening their mouth.
- Sucking: set off by contact with nipple
- Swallowing: triggered by sucking
- Tonic Neck: when head turns/is turned to one side, the arm on that side of the body extends while the arm and knee on the other side flex (i.e. baby is trying to get/keep its hand in view)
Define: Stepping Reflex
Infant lifts first 1 leg and then the other in a coordinated pattern resembling walking
When/why does the stepping reflex disappear?
When: 2 months old
Why: Infants’ rapid weight gain in the first few weeks after birth causes their legs to get heavier faster than they get stronger
What was Gesell and McGraw’s theory on the factor that governed motor development.
-Motor development depended on the rate of maturation of the neural cortex.
What are the current theories on the factors that govern motor development?
-Combination of many factors including neural mechanisms, increase in strength, posture, control, balance, perceptual skill, and motivation.
Define: Prereaching Movements
Clumsy swiping movements by young infants toward the general vicinity of objects they see.
-Goes away at around 3-4 months when they begin to successfully reach objects
What is a child’s reaching ability at….
- 3 months
- 7 months
- 10 months
- 3 months: can successfully grab objects
- 7 months: can sit independently which makes reaching quite stable
- 10 months: approach to object is dependent on what they intend to do with the object
What did Karen Adolph discover about infant locomotion and slopes?
Infants do not transfer what they learned about crawling down slopes to how to walk down them.
What is a child’s locomotive ability at…
- 8 months
- 13 months
- 8 months: can crawl (Self-Locomotion)
- 13 months: can walk independently
Define: Self-Locomotion
Ability to move around in the environment on your own.
Define: Scale Errors
Attempt to perform an action with a miniature replica object that is much too small for the action to be completed.
- Due to a failure to integrate visual info represented in 2 dif areas of the brain in the service of action
- Incidence of scale errors decrease as we grow older
Parents keep putting babies on their backs to sleep to reduce the risk of SIDS but now babies are less likely to roll over on time (in terms of developmental milestones). Why could this be?
- Less motivation to roll over b/c better view from their backs
- Less time spent on tummies results in slower development of arm strength
Describe the Visual Cliff Research Study. What does the visual cliff research show about development?
Big sheet of plexiglass is put on top of a box. On half the glass, a sheet of checkered print is placed. The same design is placed on box floor and a divider paper is put in the middle of glass–>causes illusion of the edge of a “cliff”.
Task: infant must cross over the drop area to its mother
Result: infants would not pass the deep side of the cliff
Conclusion:Interdependence of dif domains of development
-Infant perceives and understands the significance of the depth cue of relative size (cliff’s drop)
Define: Social Referencing
The use of another’s emotional reaction to interpret an ambiguous situation
-Appears to be important in infant’s development of wariness of heights
Define: Habituation
A decrease in responsiveness to repeated stimulation
-reveals that learning has occurred
What is the speed of infant habituation indicative of?
Reflects the general efficiency of the infant’s processing of info (i.e. general cognitive ability)
Define: Differentiation
The extraction of stable/invariant elements from the constantly changing stimulation/events in the environment
ex. association b/w voice tone and facial expression
Define: Affordances
Possibilities for actions offered by objects and situations.
ex. light objects can be picked up easier than heavy objects
Define: Statistical Learning
Picking up info from the environment, forming associations among stimuli that occur in a statistically predictable pattern
Define: Classical Conditioning
Form of learning consisting of associations between an initially neutral stimulus with a stimulus that always evokes a reflexive response
-plays a role in infant’s everyday learning about the relations between environmental events that have relevance for them
What are the 4 components of classical conditioning?
- Unconditioned stimulus (UCS)
- Unconditioned response (UCR)
- Conditioned stimulus (CS)
- Conditioned response (CR)
Define: Unconditioned stimulus (UCS)
A stimulus that evokes a reflexive response
Define: Unconditioned response (UCR)
A reflexive response that is elicited by the unconditioned stimulus (UCS)
Define: Conditioned stimulus (CS)
The neutral stimulus that is repeatedly paired with the UCS
Define: Conditioned response (CR)
The originally reflexive response that comes to be elicited by the conditioned stimulus.
Define: Instrumental/Operant Conditioning
Learning the relation between one’s own behavior and the consequences that result from it
-Involves positive reinforcement
Define: Positive Reinforcement
A reward that reliably follows a behavior and increases the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated
Define: Negative Reinforcement
Application of reinforcement that DECREASES the likelihood of the behavior being repeated
Define: Contingency Relation
A reward caused by the individual’s behavior which increases the likelihood of the behavior being repeated
- could also be a punishment
ex. push button, I get candy
Define: Observational Learning/Imitation
- 6-9 month olds will imitate actions they’ve seen
- pay attention to the reason for person’s behavior
- will imitate people, but not inanimate objects
- will imitate intentions a person has, not what person actually does
What do researchers now believe about an infant’s sense of object permanence?
- Piaget’s description is wrong
- Infants are able to mentally represent and think about the existence of invisible objects and events
Define: Violation-Of-Expectancy Procedure
Infants are shown an event that should evoke surprise/interest if it violates something the infant knows or assumes to be true
-Used to prove object permanence is present in infants.
How: infants will looks at “impossible” events for longer than at “possible” events
What quality must inanimate objects have in order for infants to attribute intention and goals to them?
Inanimate entities must “behave” like humans
What are the 3 things language development involves?
- Language generativity
- How much language you produce
- Semantic development
- learning to express meaning; includes word learning
- Pragmatic development
- Social use; how to tailor language to your audience
Define: Phoneme
The basic unit of sound used to produce language
Define: Phonological Development
The acquisition of knowledge about the sound systems of one’s own language.
Define: Morpheme
The smallest unit of meaningful sound, usually 1 or 2 phonemes
Define: Syntax
The rules for the ways in which words can be combined to make sense (word order)
Define: Syntactic Development
Learning the rules for combining words in a given language
Define: Metalinguistic Knowledge
Knowledge about language; its properties and how it’s used in conversing
What does it mean when we say that that “language is a SPECIES-SPECIFIC behavior”?
Species-specific in that only humans acquire language in the normal course of development in their normal enviroment
For 90% of right-handed people, which hemisphere controls language?
Left hemisphere
Why is language “species-universal”?
Because all young humans must learn language
Define: Broca’s aphasia
Damage/trauma to Broca’s area in the brain
-Results in difficulty producing speech
Define: Wernicke’s aphasia
Damage/trauma to Wernicke’s area in the brain
-Results in jumbled speech that makes no sense and trouble comprehending language
When is the critical period for language development?
Critical Period=under 5 yrs old
- after age 5, language acquisition is more difficult and less successful
- Critical period=time during which language develops most readily
Who is Victor the “Wild Child”?
- Kid abandoned by his parents and lived in the woods near Aveyron, France
- Discovered in 1800, he was 12 yrs old, walked on all 4s and frightened of people
- No language ability at all
-After years of intense socialization, Victor could act appropriately in social situations but CANNOT learn more than a few words
Is having a brain enough to result in sufficient language development?
NO
- Need exposure to other people and using language with them
- Listening and understanding what others are saying
Define: Infant-Directed Speech (IDS)
A distinctive mode of speech used by adults in talking to infants and young children, even while recognizing that they cannot talk back
-Tones and pitches used to indicate emotion are universal across cultures
Define: Prosody
The characteristic rhythm, cadence, melody, and tonal pattern with which a language is spoken
Define: Categorical Perception
Phenomenon where infants and adults can perceive speech sounds as belonging to discrete categories (such as that /b/ and /p/ are on a similar acoustic continuum but are dif sounds)
In the first months of life, how does an infant’s vocal cords prepare for speech production?
Through…
- crying
- sneezing
- sighing
- burping
- lip-smacking
Then at 6-8 weeks, simple speech sounds like…
- goo
- ooohh
- aahh
Define: Babbling
Production of syllables made up of a consonant followed by a vowel (ex. ba, pa, ma)
-starts at 7 months
-deaf infants exposed to american sign language will babble manually by making repetitive hand movements that’re components of ASL signs
Name 2 characteristics of interactive games parents play with their children to facilitate communication development.
- Intersubjectivity
2. Joint Attention
Define: Intersubjectivity
Parent and infant share a common focus of attention
Define: Joint Attention
The parent follows the baby’s head and comments on what the baby is doing/looking at.
Define: Holophrasic Period
The period in which a whole phrase is expressed by a single word
ex. “drink” can refer to a desire for juice, as could “juice”
Define: Overextension of meaning
Using a given world broadly, such as “doggie” for any four-legged creature
Define: Fast Mapping
Children learn new words from the context of their use and from comparison to words already known.
Define: Pragmatic Cues
The social contexts in which language is used
How do children use pragmatic cues?
- Use an adult’s focus of attention as a cue to word meaning
- Draw inferences about a word’s meaning from what’s being done as the word is used
- Infer meaning from the linguistic context in which new word appears
Define: Shape Bias
Extension of a novel noun to novel objects of the same shape, even when the objects differ dramatically in size, color, and texture
ex. Child who has a heard a U-shaped wooden block called a “dax” will use “dax” to refer to another U-shaped object of a dif color or texture
Define: Syntactic Bootstrapping
Using the grammatical structure of whole sentences to figure out meaning, inferring that an assigned word is descriptive of action
When does a child begin to understand whole sentences?
-13 months: will understand that words used in combination have a meaning separate from the meaning of the individual words
- 2 yr: can combine words into simple sentences
- first sentences are telegraphic speech=2 word utterances in which nonessential elements are missing
What is the result of Overregularization Errors?
The irregular word forms get treated as they were the regular word forms
ex. Mans instead of Man
ex. Goed instead of Go
-BUT this indicates child’s awareness that word form changes with meaning
What is the function of private speech?
Acts as a self-regulatory function that helps child to organize his/her actions
Define: Collective Monologues
Piaget’s term for children’s talk with their peers
What are the 2 ways parents help children produce coherent accounts of past events?
- Scaffolding=asking questions
2. Helping them fill in the blanks
What is the universal agreement of language development?
Children develop language as a result of the interaction between the brain and language exposure–nature and nuture
What are the 3 styles of learning language?
- Referential/Analytic Style
- Expressive/Holistic Style
- Wait-And-See Style
Define: Style (language development context)
Strategies young children use when beginning to speak
Define: Referential/Analytic Style
Speech strategy that analyzes the speech stream into individual phonetic elements and words
-The first utterances of children who adopt this style tend to use isolated, often monosyllabic words
Define: Expressive/Holistic Style
Speech strategy that gives more attention to the overall sound of language (rhythmic and intonational patterns) than to the phonetic elements of which it is composed
Define: Wait-And-See Style
Speech strategy that typically involves a late start in speaking but a large vocabulary once speaking begins
-Thought to be due to child just listening to speech for long time before trying it out themself
Define: Fast Mapping
The process of rapidly learning a new word simply from hearing the contrastive use of a familiar and the unfamiliar word
What is the NATIVIST VIEW (CHOMSKY) on language development?
- humans have an innate “universal grammar” that’s common to all languages which makes learning possible
- brain has innate language systems separate from other cognitive functions (modularity hypothesis)
Define: Universal Grammar
A set of highly abstract, unconscious rules that are common to all languages
-Developed by Chomsky
Define: Modularity Hypothesis
Brain contains a self-contained language module that is separate from other aspects of cognitive functioning
What is the INTERACTIONIST VIEW on language development?
- Everything is influenced by its communicative function
- Language is primarily a social skill
- Structural properties (that nativists think are innate) are mastered in the process of learning to communicate with others
What is the CONNECTIONIST VIEW on language development?
- Info needed to acquire language is contained in language itself
- not based on innate linguistic knowledge or special language-specific brain mechanism BUT ON general-purpose learning mechanisms
- language develops as a result of the gradual strengthening of connections in the neural network
*neural network=numerous interconnected processing units
Define: Object Substitutions
Use of one object for a purpose it doesn’t traditionally have
ex. using a banana as a phone
What is the most commonly drawn 1st object?
A human figure
Define: Concepts
General ideas/understandings that can be used to group together objects, events, qualities or abstractions that are similar in some way
-needed for helping people make sense of the world
What is the nativist’s view on concepts?
Innate understanding of concepts plays a central role in development.
What is the empiricist’s view on concepts?
Concepts arise from basic learning mechanisms
What 2 questions does dividing objects encountered in the world into categories help children answer?
- What kinds of things are in the world?
2. How are those things related to each other?
What are the 3 categories children sort objects into?
- Inanimate objects
- People
- Living Things
Define: Category Hierarchies
- Method of sorting objects
- Categories are related by set-subset relations
- ex. Furniture/Chair/Armchair
Define: Perceptual Categorization
The grouping together of objects that have similar appearances
-done by infants
What are an infant’s categorization based on? How about a 2 yr old?
Infants: Parts of an object rather than on the object as a whole.
2 yr old: start to categorize objects on the 1) basis of overall shape and 2) the basis of function (what object can do)
- increased understanding of category hierarchies
- increased understanding of causal connections
What are the 3 main levels of category hierarchies?
- Superordinate Level
- Very general one
- Subordinate Level
- Very specific one
- Basic Level
- One in between the other 2 levels
Which level of category hierarchies do children learn first?
Basic level
Why: Because objects at this level share many common characteristics but are also relatively easy to discriminate between
Define: Child-basic Categories
A level sometimes formed by children in category hierarchies
-Generality is between basic and subordinate level categories
Define: Naive Psychology
A commonsense level of understanding other people and oneself
What are the 2 concepts that we always apply when trying to understand why someone did something?
- Desires
2. Beliefs
What are the 3 properties of Naive Psychology concepts?
- They refer to invisible mental states
- The concepts are all linked to each other in cause-effect relations
- They develop early in life
What are the 3 things crucial for psychological understanding that 2.5 yr olds start to grasp?
- Intention
- The goal of acting in a certain way
- Joint Attention
- 2 or more people focus deliberately on the same referent
- Intersubjectivity
- The mutual understanding that people share during communication
At these ages, what can children understand?
- 2 yr old
- 3 yr old
- 5 yr old
2 yr old: connection b/w other people’s desires and their specific actions BUT show little understanding that beliefs are also influential
3 yr old: desires and beliefs affect behavior BUT has difficulty with false-belief problems
5 yr old: find false-belief problems very easy
Define: False-Belief Problems
Tasks that test a child’s understanding that other people will act in accord with their own beliefs even when the child knows that these beliefs are incorrect
Define: Theory-Of-Mind-Module (TOMM)
A hypothesized brain mechanism devoted to understanding other human beings
- Interactions w/ other people is crucial for developing TOMM
- General info-processing skills are necessary for children to understand people’s minds
