Lecture 4 - Links Between Action + Perception in Development

Question 1

(lecture):

What methods cane used to measure visual acuity?

Answer 1

(lecture):

• Preferential looking
• Eye-tracking

(do some research, or the reading, or watch the lecture back again to learn more about these methods)

Question 2

(Reading):

Siegler, R., Saffran, J., DeLoache, J., Gershoff, E. T. & Eisenberg, N. (2017). How Children Develop. Chapter 5.

Answer 2

(Reading):

Question 3

(lecture summary):

Summary: This lecture reviews evidence of early perceptual abilities, and relations between perception and motor control. It covers evidence that perception influences action capabilities and that new action capabilities (spanning reaching to walking) influence perception. It describes methodologies used in this research, including eyetracking, habituation paradigms, and imitation.

Answer 3

(lecture summary):

Question 4

(lecture study question):

Study question: Describe and evaluate two experimental methods for the study of perception and action in human infants.

Answer 4

(lecture study question):

Question 5

(lecture):

What is habituation?

Answer 5

(lecture):

The diminishing of an innate response to a frequently repeated stimulus.

Question 6

(lecture):

Describe perceptual narrowing.

How did Kelley et al., 2007 test this in infants?

Answer 6

(lecture):

Infants are open to perceiving and differentiating a wide range of stimuli early in life

With exposure to specific information, their ability to discriminate narrows

This is true across a variety of stimuli: auditory perception, face perception, music perception, etc.

(look at lecture slide 26, and the lecture recording around 20 mins mark)

Question 7

(lecture):

What are 4 depth cues that are used by infants?

Answer 7

(lecture):

Optical expansion: The visual image increases as an object comes toward us, causing the background to recede.

Binocular disparity: The two eyes do not send the same signals to the brain because there are different retinal images of the object in each eye.

Stereopsis: The process by which the visual cortex combines the different neural signals from each eye to create depth perception.
- Begins around 4 months & completed within a few weeks

Monocular (pictorial) cues: The perceptual cues of depth that can be perceived by one eye alone. Examples are

• Relative size
• Object interposition

Question 8

(lecture):

Describe The role of motor learning on perception: The visual cliff. (Gibson and Walk (1960))

Answer 8

(lecture):

Watch video on lecture slide 29

Another experiment with cats - (Held & Hein (1963)) (lecture slide 30)

Question 9

(lecture):

What are 2 Motor development milestones?

Answer 9

(lecture):

Reaching: For the first few months of life, infants engage in pre-reaching movements such as swiping and swatting at objects. (

Self-locomotion: At 8 months or so, infants begin to move themselves around in the environment. By 13–14 months they are walking.

Question 10

(lecture):

Describe the study by Libertus & Needham, 2011, on the role of reaching on social perception.

Answer 10

(lecture):

See slide 32 and the lecture recording (around 32 min mark)

Question 11

(lecture):

Describe the effect of culture on motor development.

Answer 11

(lecture):

Cultural practices lead to variations from the motor milestones.

Some practices accelerate motor development (mothers in Mali exercise their infants), while others retard motor development (the Ache in Paraguay carry their infants for three years).

See slide 34-35