L16 & 17 Infant Cognition Flashcards
1
Q
What is the bias in the field of cognitive development?
A
- Field is incentivised to display infant cognition as sophisticated as it get popular press attention
- Need to be cautious about great claims
2
Q
Where does knowledge come from?
A
- The origin of knowledge is the fundamental question of cognitive development in infancy
- Piaget was the pioneer in this field.
- Before getting to contemporary theories and approaches → Will discuss basics of infant research methods.
3
Q
What is the challenge of studying infants?
A
- Cannot talk
- Cannot follow instructions
- Short attention span
- Limited behavioural repertoire
- Develop rapidly so different tasks need to be used at different ages
4
Q
What are the experimental methods used in studying children?
A
- Behavioural Tasks
- Dependent variables: Sucking, head turning, reaching, surprise, looking time
- Physiological Tasks
- Dependent variables: Heart Rate, Event Related Potentials (ERPs), Hemodynamic response (e.g. fMRI, Optical Imaging)
5
Q
How does habituation work?
A
- Normally have infant sat on a parents lap, facing a screen. Adults wear headphones
- Press button when infant looks at screen and then release when they are not. May use attention getters before presenting new stimulus. Allows you to keep track of how much time children are looking at object of interest
- You compare if they look more at the new stimulus or old stimulus
- Novel preference → Look more at the new stimulus
- Familiarity preference → Look more at the old stimulus
- Habituation
- Look at something longer, the first time it is shown but don’t want to look as it becomes familiar
- Establish amount of time infant looks at stimulus for 3 trials to get average looking time - count as habituated when reach 3 trial average when gets below 50% of original
6
Q
How can we test an infants ability through habituation?
A
- Can test what infants are capable of perceiving by switching stimuli once they are already habituated
- e.g. perceptual habituation
- Very young infants wouldn’t be able to dishabituate to the grey field following the thinnest lines: visual acuity too low to discriminate the two
- Familiarity preference lasts longer when the stimuli is more complicated as taking more time to think what is happening
- Older infants process faster, the same complicated stimulus, compared to younger infants
- Each infant will have a different amount of exposure to begin with as it takes a different amount of time to become familiar
7
Q
How did Cohen & Straus (1979) demonstrate habituation can be generalized?
A
- Had 30 month old infants habituate to black and white sketches of faces
- Three habituation conditions
- Habituate to a single face at a single orientation
- Habituate to a single face at multiple orientations.
- Habituate to multiple faces at multiple orientations
- Findings
- P3 = Familiar face at familiar orientation stimulus
- Have low looking times to this stimulus
- P3 = Familiar face at familiar orientation stimulus
- F1 = Familiar face at novel orientation (not seen at this angle before)
- Novelty preference shown in 1 but not in 2 or 3, show familiarity preference
- FN = Novel face at a novel orientation
- 1 and 2 both show novelty preference
- 3 shows familiarity preference
- Generalize their habituation based on the pattern
- Younger infants did not learn the pattern - more likely to have novelty preference for those that should be familiar
8
Q
What are the principles of habituation?
A
- When first learning about a stimulus, infants may show a familiarity preference. The more complex the stimulus, the longer the familiarity preference may persist.
- After infants have fully processed the stimulus and habituate, they will develop a novelty preference.
- Infants do not just habituate to the specifics of individual stimuli, but they habituate to the pattern in the stimuli and generalize their habituation to new stimuli that fit the pattern.
- Allows test of whether infants are capable of learning particular patterns, not just whether they can discriminate between individual stimuli.
9
Q
What is the nativism vs constructivism debate?
A
- Everything has a genetic component, every domain involves learning
- Innate knowledge of specific domains, with domain-specific learning mechanisms (nativists) vs no innate knowledge but innate domain-general learning mechanisms (constructivists)
10
Q
How does nativism mean cognitive modularity?
A
- Information encapsulation - different types of domains are present as demarcated from one another
- Sensitive to specific inputs - If you expect language to exist, there are certain cues that alert you to the fact it is language
- Given the specific perceptual inputs, the module takes over
11
Q
What are mechanisms and core knowledge in domain-specific learning (nativism)?
A
- MODULES: specialized capabilities
- Perhaps specialized brain tissue
- Designed to ‘pick up’ certain kinds of information from the sense organ
- Given particular perceptual input, modules are activated and apply their Core Knowledge
- e.g., given certain cues, infant will interpret a percept as an object and make certain inferences, such as still existing while out of sight.
- Learns specific things about domains
- e.g., the properties of particular categories of objects: size, shape, etc.
- Anti-Piagetian
12
Q
Where does object knowledge come from? What are the different parts of object knowledge?
A
- Object Unity: Do infants represent parts of objects that they cannot see?
- Object Permanence: Do infants understand that objects exist that they cannot see?
- Piaget said infants do not start out with this ability. Cohen & Cashon agree.
- Core knowledge theorizers (e.g., Carey, Spelke, Baillargeon) argue that they do start with object knowledge
13
Q
What did Kellman & Spelke (1983) find about object unity (nativist approach)?
A
- Perception of object unity in 4 month olds, moving rod condition
- Reveal broken rod or full rod. PPT show novelty preference for one you didn’t expect
- There was a novelty preference to the broken rod - infants represented one unified rod during habituation
- Suggests infants are born with knowledge of objects
- Repeated experiment but rods were stationary
- No novelty preference, no evidence of perceived unity
- Co-motion is thought to be input to object module
- So, without co-motion, infant can not apply core object knowledge
- Innate expectation that surfaces act in some way?
14
Q
What is the constructivist approach to explaining object unity?
A
- Perceive object unity from similar surfaces moving together because those are relationships that exist in the world
- Suggests developmental changes in the first four months
- There are changes in ability to construct an object percept from visual input (cognitive skill of the infant develops
-
Study: Johnson & Aslin (1998)
- 2 month olds see rod as unified, only when greater area of rod is visible (perform worse, the greater the occlusion of the object)
- 4 month olds do better in harder conditions
- Slater, Johnson, Brown & Badendoch (1996) → Newborns show preference for the whole rpd
Carey (2011) - Argued this is limited - 2 month olds may just lack the ability to track motion rather than a failure of object feature recognition
15
Q
How do constructivists vs nativists understand object unity?
A
- Constructivists = Gradual development as gradual development of object unity
- Nativists = Development is the developing ability to perceive motion, allowing object core knowledge to be applied
17
Q
What is the violation of expectation paradigm (nativist?)? Baillargeon (1987)
A
- Habituate/familiarize to some event & two critical test trials
- Perceptually more familiar but physically impossible
- Perceptually novel by physically possible
Baillargeon (1987)
- 4-5 month olds show surprise to the impossible event
- Shouldn’t be able to go all the way down
- Complete board lowering is perceptually familiar but with the object there, it is impossible (only if infants represent the occluded object)
- Claim that if infants show novelty preference from perception alone, will be surprised by partial movement but they’re not = Represent the physical object
- **Constructivists argue we can’t distinguish between world knowledge from familiarity preference unless fully habituated*
19
Q
What was Meltzoff & Moore (1998) study of object memory vs object permanence (constructivist)?
A
- Perception mismatching memory can be surprising if we don’t understand object permanence
- 5 - 9 month olds show surprise to shape change - suggests perception-memory mismatch
- Findings consistent with constructivism in permanence task
- Understanding permanence means realizing objects should re-appear when no longer occluded, as shown by surprise to violation in permanence task
- 9 month olds = surprised, 5 month olds = don’t show surprise
24
Q
How did Young-Cohen investigate if children can keep track of feature correlations (1983)? Constructivist
A
- 4,7 & 10 month olds habituate to novel animals
- Vary on feet, legs, ears, tail and body
- Some features are correlated across animals
- At test, infants see 3 novel animals
- Familiar features and preserves correlations from habituation
- Familiar features but violates correlations
- Novel features (a totally novel stimulus)
- Novel features should elicit dishabituation
- If infants learned the feature correlations, then the uncorrelated exemplar should elicit dishabituation
