Infant Perception Flashcards
Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale
To check;
- reflexes
- muscle tone
- state changes
- responsiviness to stimuli
Neonatal ICU Network Neruobehavioral Scale
- New born risk for developmental problems
- Low birth weight, preterm deliver, substance exposure
What is method used to study infant perception, attention and memory?
- Habituation; repetitive observation of the same stimuli results in loss of interest
- Recovery; a change in the environment, new interest
How does habitutation work?
1- Getting used to seeing the stimulus - habituation
2- Focusing on the novelty - the new stimulus
3 - Focus on the familiar stimulus
- Babies have a preference for familiarity over novelty
What are babies more attentive to?
- Movements
- Remember actions better than the person doing it
Newborn Imitation
- Innate ability
Some claims it declines, it starts out as a reflex, others say it doesnt
What is mirror neurons?
- Specialized cells for imitiation
- 6 months of age
- Powerful way of learning
Touch
Basic reflex around the mouth - survival
Fundamental for
- Interactions; responsiveness via gentle touching, positive
- Physical growth and emotional development
- Releasing painkilling chemicals, endorphins; sensitive to pain
- Exploring the environment and distinguish shape and texture of objects
Can overstimulate the CNS
- Hurt future development
- Sleep disturbances
- Feeding problems
- Sensitive to pain/stress
Taste and Smell
- Preferences to basic tastes and odors at birth
- Traces of survivial - newborn use scent of mother to guide towards the breast
- Differentiate their mother to another mother
- Smell used to reveal preferences of human milk than formula
- Infants differentiate different types of food and caregrivers from othes through smell
- Information and guides behavior
Hearing
- Sensitive to sound, especially speech
- Explore the environment
- Gradually evolves
- 3-day infant orient head and eyes at general direction of sound
- Differentiate varity of sound patterns
Parents vs Strangers, Native language vs foreign
Statistical learning
- Progress language perception via patterns and sounds
How does infants react to speech?
- Listens longer to human speech than sounds
- Can detect subtle changes early on and regularities
- Preferences to their native tongue
Important that parents engage with their children, increase responsiveness
Vision
- Least developt at birth, but the sense we rely on the most to explore our surroundings
- Development takes months, up to years
- At birth; cannot focus their eyes well, fineness of discrimination is limited, parents faces are blurry
- Babies prefer colors but cant distinguish them
- Still explore alot
How does the visual system develop?
- Rapid development first months
2 - focus on obejcts like adults
4 - color discrimination like adults
4 years - visual sharpness like adults - Use of scanning and tracking the environment, bidirectional association
What is depth perception?
- Ability to judge distance between objects and the distance from ourself
How does depth perception develop?
Motion, perceiving moving objects , they are not flat - week 3-4
Binocular depth - 2-3 months and improves over the year
- Steropsis; different visual information from both eyes blended to gauge depth and movement
Pictorial depth, sensitivity to visual effects, 3D vision - 3-4mont and improve of the year
- In correlation with motor skils
How does pattern perception develop?
3 weeks
- Poor contrast sensitivity
- Prefers large, simple patterns
2 months
- Detect detail in complex patterns
- Scans internal features
4 months
- Detect patterns with no clear boundry present
12 months
- Detect objects with 2/3 of drawing missing
How does face perception develop?
- Prefer simple drawings of face presented upright
- Scan entire stimulus and organize patterns into a whole , details in someones face
- Fine distinctions between different faces
- Prefer faces of same race - 3-6 months
- Prefer emotional expression
- Newborns search for structure
- Recongnize their mom based on outlines of their face
How does object perception develop?
First week after birth;
- Size constancy - perception of an objects size as the same despite changes in the size of its retinal image
- Shape constancy - perception of an object shape as stable despite changes
- Relies on motion and spatial arrangement to identify objects
- 4-5 months; differentiate shape, color and texture of an object
What is intermodel perception?
- All senses are used
- Help to make sense when there is a lot of information
- Fundamental for psychological development - infants provided with a diverse experiences process more information, learn faster and has better memory
Amodal sensory properties
Information that is not specific to one single modality, but overlaps
Differentiation Theory
- Infants actively search for invariant, stable, features of the environment
- Detecting patterns
- Finer details over time
Affordances
- The action possibilities that a situation offers an organism with certain motor capabilities
Exploring
Touching
Falling
What happens if infants is exposed to a less enrich environment?
- Below average in physical and psychological development
- Emotional and intellectual impairments
- Behavioral problems
- Difficult to study due to ethical reasons
- Use of natural environment , orphanage
- Infants can be too stimulated, not too great either
