Learning to Perceive and Understand the World Flashcards
What did William James suggest about newborns perception of the sensory world
-sensory world to the newborn is naïve about the physical world , infant cannot make an appropriate understanding/make sense of perceptual world
- Rationalist idea
Nativist perspective on how infants perceive the world
- young babies are able to not just perceive the world, but to think about it in sophisticated ways,
- In an abstract way
what were debates about epistemology/constructionism influential for?
empiricist and nativist positions which shape debate in developmental psychology
what does piaget’s sensorimotor constructionist account consist of?
- 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
which perceptual developmental theory did gibson suggest?
rather than proceeding through a process of gradual integration of features, perceptual development might be a process of gradual differentiation
Differentiation vs integration
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)
what are some early observation techniques ?
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
which techniques have been developed to investigate perceptual/cognitive abilities?
preferential looking, violation of expectation, visual habituation, and anticipatory looking
primary limitation of behavioral measures
- 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
infants and imaging techniques
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
frantz (1961)
provided first evidence that infants could distinguish visual forms early in life, via visual preferences towards eye figures and schematic faces over other stimuli
what is looking behaviour?
the most fruitful way of investigating visual perception in infants
Visual habituation
- 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
Violation of expectation
- 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
object perception/discrimination after birth
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
light field and surface reflectance (ages )
- 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
slater’s fixed-trial familiarisation (1991)
- 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
What does slaters fixed trial familiarisation study support
Supports the differentiation account where we focus on particular properties of objects which are important for differentiating the world
What did Slaters’s size/ shape constancy study show
- Demonstrated babies are able to perceive objects of constant size and oreintations (looking at configurable features )
violation of expectation
baillargeon (1987) (age)
- 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
piaget’s disputes about object permanence
-(1954) observed that 6m (stage III) show striking neglect of objects once hidden
- suggest it develops at 8 months
what does spelke argue about core knowledge? (give example + age)
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)
issues with the solidity violation and core knowledge
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
Piagets predictions about object permeance and looking time
- 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
Multisensory perception
- 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
how does Multisensory information present considerable challenges to newborns?
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
evidence of infants’ good MS abilities
due to early sensitivity to amodal MS properties, which inspired the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (bahrick and lickliter, 2000)
intersensory redundancy hypothesis (bahrick and lickliter, 2000)
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)
How does the intersensory redundancy hypothesis work
- 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
what does slater (1999) suggest amodal audiovisual presentations assist? (age)
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
molyneux’s question/suggestion
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
visually impaired infants’ learning to bind the senses from experience
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
why can infants demonstrate expectations of objects but not in action (multisensory explanation)
one explanation is that whilst visual object perception develops early, a fuller multisensory appreciation of objects is slower to develop
face preferences in newborns + utero
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
learning of speech in utero
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)
preferences for maternal odours in utero
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
Transnatal chemosensory continuity in action hypothesis
olfaction increases visual sensitivity and learning about the social world
learning of flavours in utero
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)
what does learning of flavours in utero suggest
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
perceptual narrowing of speech sound discrimination (age)
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
how is speech/phoneme discrimination argued to work
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
perceptual narrowing of face perception (ages)
6m could discriminate between human and monkey faces, whereas 10m could only discriminate human faces
what is perceptual narrowing?
reduction in sensitivity of task-irrelevant domains to develop specialisation
Multisensory person perception (age)
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
evidence of increased functional specialisation in face perception with adults
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
evidence of increased functional specialisation in face perception with infants
- 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
the developing social brain (lloyd-fox, 2013)
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
