Lecture 10 Flashcards
Discuss Eimas & Quinn (1994)’s study
Investigated the formation of perceptual categories without training. Initial presentation of six pairs of horses followed by horses paired with either cats, zebras or giraffes. They found in 3 month old babies they looked longer at the pictures with other animals than the horses
Discuss habituation/dishabituation in 3-4 month olds perception
Form category of cats that exclude lions and dogs
Discuss operant conditioning in 3 month olds
Can form shape categories as evidence by the lack of response to a letter shape when prior conditioning to a different letter-shape
Discuss category formation
Specific attributes contribute to category formation - although also motion information contributes
How do we get concepts from perception
Younger & Gotlieb (1988) investigated concept formation and found 3 month olds categorise only good forms - 5 month olds categorise good and intermediate and 7 months old can categorise poor forms as well. So they can conclude conceptual categorisation closely linked to perceptual similarities
Can concepts develop of perceptual categories - Mandler & McDonough 1993
7 month babies treated both birds and planes as members of the same category. In contrast 9/11 month olds treated plastic birds and airplanes as different catergories despite the perceptual similarities. Conceptual categorisation guided their examination of the objects - they treated differently birds and planes but they did not treat dogs, rabbits or birds the same. Conceptual and perceptual categorisation emerges at different level . Mandler concluded that perceptual and conceptual categorisation are two distinct processes BUT she fails to provide an explanation of how concepts develop
What is the case with autism in terms of conceptual and perceptual categorisation
Children with autism have enhanced discrimination of features which, is argued, to lead to failure in processing similarities. Thus the case of autism can be taken as a natural experiment to test the extent to which the processing of perceptual similarities has on concept formation. If perceptual similarities guide concept formation and they fail to see similarities, then their concept formation
Discuss Lopez & Leekam (2003)’s study
Memory for semantically related objects and words. Semantically related lists and unrelated lists. Found that no difference between autistic and ‘normal’ children.
Are there any priming effects?
Both groups were faster recognising objects and words after an appropriate context than after neutral or inappropriate context. Performance of children with autism was not different from TD children in with tasks - except for longer RTs
What are the conclusions from this lecture
Findings from autism suggest that conceptual categorisation may be independent from perceptual categorisation. BUT the debate is still open - people still argue that concepts derive from perception. Categorisation processes starts at birth and are partly innate - attunement theory: innate knowledge triggered by environment
Discuss visual activity including colour perception and pattern perception
Most of our cortex is involved in visual processing (40-50%), it is tested with habituation paradigms. Newborns are 10-30 times poorer than adults as cones are not fully developed so only 2% of light hits the fovea. By 8 months it is almost as good as adults. In colour perception after 1 week babies can distinguish more obvious colour perceptions, and by 2 months they can perceive harder visuals however by 2-3 months it is similar to adults ability. By 7 months, babies can perceive pattern illusions but in newborns they need added motion cues to help
Why is categorisation important
It reduces the complexity of the environment, and is the means by which objects of the world are identified. It reduces the need for constant learning and allows us to decide what constitutes appropriate action. It also enables s to order and relate classes of objects and events.
What is categorisation
To categorise is to render discriminably different things equivalent, to group objects and events around us into classes and to respond to them in term of their class membership rather than their uniqueness
Discuss speech sound perception at birtch
There is perception of sound when baby is in the womb as they prefer their mothers speech over anothers and discriminate own language from others. Infants can discriminate speech sounds from other types of stimuli from birth. Left hemisphere activation for normal speech as opposed to backward speech. In the first year of life, phonemic categorisation after 2 days they can distinguish between ‘a’ and ‘i’ and after 1 month can distinguish between ‘ba’ and ‘pa’. During the first year of life they loose discrimination of sounds that are not part of their native language. With content categorisation at 6 months they prefer content over function words in any language and at 8/11 months only preference is in their own language
Discuss face processing
After 3 days: preference for mother’s face and after 9 days: preference for schematic face over scrambled face
