Learning to Perceive and Understand the World

Question 1

what were debates about epistemology influential for?

Answer 1

empiricist and nativist positions which shape debate in developmental psychology

Question 2

what does piaget’s sensorimotor constructionist account consist of?

Answer 2

considers inheritance and experience interactions to shape development, by qualitative shifts in perception and understanding

Question 3

which perceptual developmental theory did gibson suggest?

Answer 3

rather than proceeding through a process of gradual integration of features, perceptual development might be a process of gradual differentiation

Question 4

what do early observation techniques provide?

Answer 4

such as baby biographies (Darwin, 1887) provide rich individual detail, but lack objective sensitivity

piaget’s clinical method involved presenting informal manual search tasks to infants and adjusting their complexity depending on success

Question 5

which techniques have been developed to investigate perceptual/cognitive abilities?

Answer 5

preferential looking, violation of expectation, visual habituation, and anticipatory looking

Question 6

primary limitation of perceptual ability measures

Answer 6

is that behavioural immaturity may potentially obscure perceptual competence

Question 7

infants and imaging techniques

Answer 7

imaging techniques (EEG and fNIRS) are increasingly being used with infants to trace development of brain function in early development

providing good temporal and spatial resolution respectively

Question 8

frantz (1961)

Answer 8

provided first evidence that infants could distinguish visual forms early in life, via visual preferences towards eye figures and schematic faces over other stimuli

Question 9

what is looking behaviour?

Answer 9

the most fruitful way of investigating visual perception in infants

Question 10

object perception/discrimination after birth

Answer 10

slater (1983) found newborns had the ability to discriminate shapes

whereas cohen and younger (1983) showed the way they discriminate forms changes within the first few months:

• 1.5m can dishabituate to novel orientation
• 3.5m can dishabituate to novel angle

Question 11

light field and surface reflectance

Answer 11

yang (2014) indicates infants between 3-4m detect changes in light field, but not surface reflectance, whereas this occurs the other way around in 7-8m.

Question 12

slater’s fixed-trial familiarisation (1991)

Answer 12

demonstrates newborns could perceive objects to constant size, shape, and form, in the first few days of life

unlike younger, who believed they could only perceive salient shapes in the environment

Question 13

what did spelke (1988) find with modified habituation and looking preferences?

Answer 13

object permanence

evidence of infants’ innate understanding that common motion signifies the object is hidden behind the occluder

Question 14

violation of expectation
baillargeon (1987)

Answer 14

shows 3.5m infants look longer at impossible events – evidence of early knowledge and expectations for permanence and solidity

Question 15

piaget’s disputes about object permanence

Answer 15

(1954) observed that 6m (stage III) show striking neglect of objects once hidden

Question 16

what does spelke argue about core knowledge?

Answer 16

we have innate neural systems providing us with core knowledge about the world, such as 2.5m understanding solidity seen in the solidity violation (1992)

Question 17

issues with the solidity violation and core knowledge

Answer 17

infants are still unable to retrieve solid objects in manual tasks by 2y (hood, 1998)

looking behaviour demonstrates a type of knowledge which fails to meet piaget’s criteria of permanence

Question 18

what did piaget propose instead of object permanence?

Answer 18

reciprocal organisations of sensorimotor schemas → objective representations

multisensory links may be involved in developing the full understanding of objects

Question 19

how does MS information present considerable challenges to newborns?

Answer 19

MS information arrives at different latencies, levels of acuity, and in different spatial formats, which are all processed into information that moves relative to one another

brain, body, and sensorimotor abilities change dramatically across development

Question 20

evidence of infants’ good MS abilities

Answer 20

due to early sensitivity to amodal MS properties, which inspired the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (bahrick and lickliter, 2000)

Question 21

intersensory redundancy hypothesis (bahrick and lickliter, 2000)

Answer 21

amodal information (available early) – MS information is redundant across modalities and coded in common, representational formats

arbitrary correspondence (learnt) – MS correspondences carry distinct information in separate modalities, e.g., colour and sound

Question 22

what does slater (1999) suggest amodal audiovisual presentations assist?

Answer 22

infants’ learning of arbitrary relations

this helps assist learning at 5m about modality-specific aspects of stimuli, to learn their MS world

Question 23

molyneux’s question

Answer 23

(1690) questioned whether a man born blind could distinguish between a cube and sphere through sight alone?

held (2011) said this was not possible initially, but people were able to learn very quickly – explains competence in infants via fast learning

Question 24

visually impaired infants’ learning to bind the senses from experience

Answer 24

auditory localisation was unimpaired

advantages in:
tactile localisation
audio tactile spatial integration
dealing with MS spatial conflicts

Question 25

face preferences in utero

Answer 25

preferential tracking of faces at 30 minutes old (johnson, 1991) shows newborns prefer direct eye-contact (farroni, 2002) across cultures due to faces providing communicative information

reid (2017) examined whether preferential tracking was present in utero via ultrasound.

Question 26

learning of speech in utero

Answer 26

foetal auditory system functions well before birth, as evidenced by non-nutritive sucking techniques showing newborns could differentiate towards their mothers’ voice (decasper and fifer, 1980)

Question 27

preferences for maternal odours in utero

Answer 27

olfactory learning develops at 4-8w gestation (rekow, 2021) and preference for maternal milk and amniotic fluid odours occurs at birth (schaal and marlier, 1998)

Question 28

preferences for maternal odours in utero- transnatal chemosensory continuity hypothesis

Answer 28

uterine chemosensory environment prepares infants for their postnatal sensory world (schaal, 2005)

and may also increase their visual sensitivity

Question 29

learning of flavours in utero

Answer 29

olfactory learning helps infants navigate their postnatal perceptual world, as uterine exposure can influence food preferences, such as anise (schaal, 1998) and carrot juice (menella, 2001)

Question 30

perceptual narrowing of speech sound discrimination

Answer 30

at 6m, they discriminate between phonemes across languages, but not at 12m (werker, 1984) – maturation.

Question 31

what does F2F exposure to non-native language help with?

Answer 31

retaining non-native speech sounds (kuhl, 2003)

Question 32

perceptual narrowing of face perception

Answer 32

6m could discriminate between human and monkey faces, whereas 10m could only discriminate human faces

Question 33

what is perceptual narrowing?

Answer 33

reduction in sensitivity of task-irrelevant domains to develop specialisation

Question 34

evidence of increased functional specialisation in face perception with age

Answer 34

adults show specific response to upright faces (de haan, 2002)

seen in FMRI studies of more brain regions becoming involved in face processing and more specialisation of particular areas with age

Question 35

interactive specialisation in the subcortical and cortical face system

Answer 35

subcortical (mediates preferential tracking)

cortical (develops later face preferences)

these arise from the innate bias to track faces

Question 36

the developing social brain (lloyd-fox, 2013)

Answer 36

greater blood flow in pSTS and TPJ in response to visual observation of actions correlated with fine motor skill