Infant cognition Flashcards
why study infants?
- Human adults are capable and intelligent, infants can do almost nothing, how did they get there?
- Early development lays the foundation for later life outcomes:
- Malnutrition -> chronic disease, obesity
- Early trauma has cascading effects in later
formation of social relationships - Developmental disorders: autism, adhd, dyslexia
what are the critical days
1001 critical days: fast growth processes, in the brain and elsewhere. infants are sensitive to learning, for good or for bad. early intervention and prevention are more effective than later interventions
sensori-motor stage:
- learning to move limbs
- learning to grasp
- learning to crawl and walk
- understanding development leads to better understanding of adult performance
- early development is very important for later outcomes, health, happiness, income
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wat is lastig aan infant research
- difficult
- expensive
- time consuming
- small sample sizes
standardized tests voorbeelden
- bayleys scales of infant development (motor development, grasping, manipulating objects, attention, pointing, naming objects)
- Infant Behaviour Questionnaire (IBQ) (measuring temperament)
wat is lastig aan standardized tests
- cumbersome, time consuming
- requires much training
- parent measures are not measuring the infant
- sometimes not very reliable
visual preference method
infants show systematic preferences for faces, complex and new stimuli
assumption: longer looking time is more preference/interest, being able to distinguish stimuli
looking times can be used to study the development of perceptual and cognitive abilities (what do they perceive at what age, what do they know at what age)
habituation-dishabituation
- same-different learning
- approximate number systems
- what will infants pay attention to?
vanaf wanneer kan je visual acuity zien in infants
develops almost completely before 3 months
habituation-dishabituation=
- repeated presentation of the same stimulus
- looking time (attention) decreases -> habituation
- looking time increases again upon presentation of a noval stimulus (dishabituation)
- novel stimulus (an opportunity to learn)
looking behaviour in visual preference method and habituation measures are unreliable
- distracted
- bored
- tired
- interpretation is ambiguous (looking time hoger = meer interesse?)
- no clear measure of understanding
- novelty preference (dus niet perse meer geinteresseerd, maar van nature meer aangetrokken tot novelty)
3 ways to measure attention
- EOG (electric measures of eye movements)
- eye tracking
- physiological measures (heart rate, EEG, ERP, fMRI, fNIRS, marker tasks)
eog=
Electrooculography
not very accurate, problems with artifacts. you also only measure movements, not position
eye tracking technique
- use a light to illuminate the eye (infrared, invisible)
- use of a camera to film the eye
- use an algorithm to detect the corneal reflextion, the iris and determine the eye gaze position
- raw eye tracking data: every 1,2,5 ms gaze position
- data needs to be processed into fixations and saccades
fixations=
relatively stable position
saccade=
fast movement to a new location
measures =
fixation durations, fixtion locations, fixation shifts (saccades)
eye tracking history
Yarbus studies gaze patterns: what do gaze patterns look like depending on the instructions they are given?
summary
- standardized tests are often subjective (parent reports), cumbersome to administer and/or unreliable
- studying infants directly: looking behaviour provides a window into the infant mind, VPC, habituation, basic processes related to complex cognitive processes and their development
- early methods: manual scoring and determination of gaze position are interesting but still unreliable
- eye tracking offers much more data (high frequency measurements) and more precise/reliable data
eye movements
- eye movements are essential for studying cognitive development in infants
- eye movement get under voluntary control early on
infant attention development
- alterness, wake-sleep cycles
- spatial orienting (engagement, disengagement, shifting)
- object attention
- endogenous control
gap attention shifting =
- initial stimulus at the center
- gap condition: central stimulus disappears, target appears
- overlap condition: target appears, central disappears after some time
- difference between gap and overlap conditions
- infants become faster
- at risk children have trauble at 14 months
covert vs overt attention
Covert attention refers to mentally focusing on something without moving your eyes toward it, while overt attention involves physically directing your gaze to the object of focus.
