Learning to Perceive and Understand the World

Question 1

What did William James suggest about newborns perception of the sensory world

Answer 1

-sensory world to the newborn is naïve about the physical world , infant cannot make an appropriate understanding/make sense of perceptual world
- Rationalist idea

Question 2

Nativist perspective on how infants perceive the world

Answer 2

• young babies are able to not just perceive the world, but to think about it in sophisticated ways,
• In an abstract way

Question 3

what were debates about epistemology/constructionism influential for?

Answer 3

empiricist and nativist positions which shape debate in developmental psychology

Question 4

what does piaget’s sensorimotor constructionist account consist of?

Answer 4

• considers inheritance and experience interactions to shape development, by qualitative shifts/steps in perception and understanding
• argues that we have separate schemas of action which are born into the child for looking etc

Question 5

which perceptual developmental theory did gibson suggest?

Answer 5

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

Question 6

Differentiation vs integration

Answer 6

integration: learn to link perceptual fratures together to perceive objects/people (empiricist)

Differentiation: we have the ability to perceive the world provided by our senses which initially fuses features together to perceive whole objects bit gradually learns to differentiate at finer and finer levels (natavist)

Question 7

what are some early observation techniques ?

Answer 7

such as baby biographies of passive observations (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 8

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

Answer 8

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

Question 9

primary limitation of behavioral measures

Answer 9

• Behaviour sits at the end of a neural processing stream, it is the output
  not sure what longer looking actually means
• measuring eye movements is noisy /unstable

Question 10

infants and imaging techniques

Answer 10

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 +helps us get earlier stages of cog processing

Question 11

frantz (1961)

Answer 11

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 12

what is looking behaviour?

Answer 12

the most fruitful way of investigating visual perception in infants

Question 13

Visual habituation

Answer 13

• Babies presented with something until they get disinterested and look away
• We then present the old thing with the new thing next to it
  Idea is that if theyve learned about it there should be a novelty preference to the new thing and to the old

Question 14

Violation of expectation

Answer 14

• Presenting something that’s surprising and shouldn’t happen in everyday life , violating physical principles
• The longer they look at these, the more they understand the particular laws/principles in place

Question 15

object perception/discrimination after birth

Answer 15

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
• newborns processed the orientation of lines of a shape rather than the shape itself, after 4 months it was the shape instead

shows babies below 4m periceve visual shapes very differently to adults

Question 16

light field and surface reflectance (ages )

Answer 16

• yang (2014) indicates infants between 3-4m detect changes in light field (because of more absolute change) , but not surface reflectance, whereas this occurs the other way around in 7-8m.
• newborns perceive differences in light in a different way to us, their visual system hasn’t learned to focus on the surface reflectance properties of objects

Question 17

slater’s fixed-trial familiarisation (1991)

Answer 17

• desensitized newborns to orientation and demonstrates newborns could perceive objects of constant size, shape, and form, in the first few days of life
• This indicates that they can process configurable info about shapes when they are taken away the CHOICE to attend to something else-suggesting babies have a choice in what they attend to

unlike Cohen and Younger, who believed they could only perceive salient shapes in the environment

Question 18

What does slaters fixed trial familiarisation study support

Answer 18

Supports the differentiation account where we focus on particular properties of objects which are important for differentiating the world

Question 19

What did Slaters’s size/ shape constancy study show

Answer 19

• Demonstrated babies are able to perceive objects of constant size and oreintations (looking at configurable features )

Question 20

violation of expectation
baillargeon (1987) (age)

Answer 20

• shows 3.5m infants look longer at impossible events even though it is more familiar
• Looked longer at impossible as they understand objects continue to exist , unable to pass through each other
  – evidence of early knowledge and expectations for permanence and solidity at 3.5 months

Question 21

piaget’s disputes about object permanence

Answer 21

-(1954) observed that 6m (stage III) show striking neglect of objects once hidden
- suggest it develops at 8 months

Question 22

what does spelke argue about core knowledge? (give example + age)

Answer 22

we have innate neural systems providing us with core knowledge about the world, such as 2.5m understanding solidity seen in the solidity violation despite it being more perceptually familair for it to pass through (1992)

Question 23

issues with the solidity violation and core knowledge

Answer 23

if infants understand objects, permeance and solidity why are they still unable to retrieve solid objects in manual tasks by 2y and serach in the impossible place (hood, 1998)

Infants may be competent at forming perceptual expectations but not yet formed representations that fulfill action

Question 24

Piagets predictions about object permeance and looking time

Answer 24

• Suggests that there’s some kind of visual awareness of that constancy of the continued existence of the object
• However he doesn’t count this as object permeance as he states it is simply an image that reenters the void instead of an object

Question 25

Multisensory perception

Answer 25

- How babies integrate findings, bringing their world together from all their senses - Findings suggest they find these aspects difficult in early life, other findings contrast saying they should be good from the start

Question 26

how does Multisensory information present considerable challenges to newborns?

Answer 26

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 and so must change how they integrate

Question 27

evidence of infants' good MS abilities

Answer 27

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

Question 28

intersensory redundancy hypothesis (bahrick and lickliter, 2000)

Answer 28

amodal information (available early) – MS information is redundant/the same across modalities and coded in common, representational formats (same info appears across multiple senses) arbitrary correspondence (learnt) – MS correspondences carry distinct information in separate modalities, e.g., colour and sound (info is different across senses= need to learn)

Question 29

How does the intersensory redundancy hypothesis work

Answer 29

- Argues that when we look at a stimulus - (a bounding ball that hitting the ground, making noise) - We get amodal/ redundant info from this stimuli as it changes direction every time we hear a sound - Babies are component at picking this up, but have to learn more arbitrary correspondences between the senses - So maybe the particular noise isn't amodal as it isn't naturally linked to the particular round shape of the object

Question 30

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

Answer 30

infants’ learning of arbitrary relations so amodal/sensory info helps assist learning at 5m about modality-specific aspects of stimuli, to learn their MS world showing that babies are also able to learn arbitrary correspondences early on

Question 31

molyneux's question/suggestion

Answer 31

Suggests we start with with entirely separate sensory modalities in touch and vision etc, we then learn to link these together through multisensory experience held (2011) used patients after cataract surgery and found discrimination of modalities was not possible initially, but people were able to learn very quickly – explains competence in infants via fast learning

Question 32

visually impaired infants' learning to bind the senses from experience

Answer 32

auditory localisation was unimpaired- comparable to sighted babies in accuracy advantages in: tactile/touch localisation enhanced in audio-tactile spatial integration condition- more advantageous in sighted children visual senses may help combine senses Shows we arent just provided with these multi-sensory abilities, we need experience to combine senses together

Question 33

why can infants demonstrate expectations of objects but not in action (multisensory explanation)

Answer 33

one explanation is that whilst visual object perception develops early, a fuller multisensory appreciation of objects is slower to develop

Question 34

face preferences in newborns + utero

Answer 34

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 preferential tracking was present in utero via ultrasound when presented with a face like configuration

Question 35

learning of speech in utero

Answer 35

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

Question 36

preferences for maternal odours in utero

Answer 36

olfactory learning (sense of smell and taste) develops at 4-8w gestation (rekow, 2021) and preference for maternal milk and amniotic fluid odours occurs at birth (schaal and marlier, 1998) shows social sensory/chemosensory environment in utero to distinguisg between people, guiding behaviour

Question 37

Transnatal chemosensory continuity in action hypothesis

Answer 37

olfaction increases visual sensitivity and learning about the social world

Question 38

learning of flavours in utero

Answer 38

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

Question 39

what does learning of flavours in utero suggest

Answer 39

chemical environment you're exposed to in utero determines the way you orient towards the food environment in post-natal life - evolutionary adaptation to guide for food sources

Question 40

perceptual narrowing of speech sound discrimination (age)

Answer 40

at 6m, they discriminate between phonemes across languages, but not at 12m, only possible in their own language (werker, 1984) – maturation. - unless exposed to particular language environment , will lose ability 6-10m

Question 41

how is speech/phoneme discrimination argued to work

Answer 41

Worker argued that we start off with a broad range of perceptual abilities in speech sound differentiation - However we focus on those that are relevant for our immediate social cultural environment - This is called perceptual narrowing

Question 42

perceptual narrowing of face perception (ages)

Answer 42

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

Question 43

what is perceptual narrowing?

Answer 43

reduction in sensitivity of task-irrelevant domains to develop specialisation

Question 44

Multisensory person perception (age)

Answer 44

newborn babies are good at matching/linking the sound and visual info up, at 12 months we lose this ability with monkeys, only sticks with humans

Question 45

evidence of increased functional specialisation in face perception with adults

Answer 45

adults show specific response to upright faces (de haan, 2002) More or less brain regions become involved +more specialization of particular areas to face processing with age , changes occur into adulthood

Question 46

evidence of increased functional specialisation in face perception with infants

Answer 46

- Presented upright and inverted faces of humans and monkeys - - N170 doesn’t seem to mirror the adults graph's - Found less specialisation , babies brain differentiated monkey faces from human faces but not inverted from upright faces - Suggests as babies get older, we show increased specialisation in the way we respond t the visual world

Question 47

the developing social brain (lloyd-fox, 2013)

Answer 47

greater blood flow in pSTS and TPJ in response to visual observation of actions correlated with fine motor skill (of reaching for things) Shows a relationship , not just about development but between fine motor ability and social understanding