Lesson 7 - Sensory Development

Question 1

How is a baseline sucking rate established?

Answer 1

Infants are given a dummy to suck and they are given a stimulus to see if the sucking rate changes

Question 2

Sucking more = ?

Answer 2

Infant is excited

Question 3

No change in sucking rate = ?

Answer 3

Not noticed anything different

Question 4

What must be done before observing the change in sucking from babies of their dummy?

Answer 4

Establish a baseline sucking rate

Question 5

What does a change in sucking rate mean?

Answer 5

infant is able to see a difference between 3 items and 5 items

Question 6

Infants are shown a picture until they habituate
Habituate means

Answer 6

fed up / used to / get bored of it
A decrease in response to a stimulus after repeated presentations
we measure how much they look at the new picture

Question 7

How can we figure out whether infants can tell that two things are different / whether they can remember the first picture?

Answer 7

Thru the proportion of time spent looking at the new picture

Question 8

What is the Visual Paired Comparison Task?

Answer 8

If infants can distinguish between unfamiliar and familiar stimuli then they should look at each other different amounts
Method relies on habituation

Question 9

HOW COULD WE ASSESS MEMORY IN CHILDREN DURING THE FIRST YEAR OF LIFE?

Answer 9

First - we know what infants cant do - but we need to figure out what they can do

Identify basic behaviours infants can reliably create

For observations there’s a starting point - do those behaviours change when aspects of the child’s environment change

Question 10

How long does it take for vision to develop?

Answer 10

Around 1 year basic perceptual aspects of the human visual system to fully develop
The neural parts of the visual system develop during gestation

Though its not until birth that visual stimuli are perceived

Question 11

When are the neural parts of the visual system developed?

Answer 11

During gestation

Question 12

What can newborn infants see?

Answer 12

Although dim and fuzzy, they can see light, shapes and movement
not capable of fixation)
range of vision approx 30cm

Question 13

What do 1-2 month old babies see?

Answer 13

Infants can fixate objects
Can distinguish between high contrast colours
eg black and white

Question 14

What can 4 month old babies see?

Answer 14

Depth perception improves
Colour vision better
Infants can now follow objects with their eyes (ie without having to turn their head)

Question 15

What can 8 month old babies see?

Answer 15

The range of effective vision increases
Infants can now recognise people from across a room

Question 16

What can 1 year olds see?

Answer 16

Basic visual skills are broadly similar at adult levels

Question 17

From birth, what can babies see in faces?

Answer 17

From birth, infants show a prefer interest in face- like stimuli
Even within a day of birth, newborns are capable of recognising individual faces
Visual recognition in newborns is unlikely to be accompanied by any explicit cognitive insight

Though early perception will form the basis for later mental representations

Newborn infant’s ability to recognise their mother’s face persists even when olfactory cues are removed and when inadvertent visual cues are controlled for

This is noteworthy given that infants’ visual acuity is relatively poor

Question 18

What did Fantz find?

Answer 18

• Fantz’s 1961 study showed a series of stimuli to young infants, and observed their looking behaviour

Fantz’s - from birth, infants showed a small but consistent preference for the face-like configuration

The same pattern is seen when presenting moving images to newborns - they follow face-like stimuli for longer (Goren et al 1975)

Question 19

Perceptual narrowing with faces?

Answer 19

With experience, infants’ visual perception gets increasingly attuned to regular features of the child’s environment

Very general abilities are more finely tuned following experience - this is particularly seen with facial recognition

Question 20

What is The “Other Race” Effect ?

Answer 20

^ The tendency to more easily recognise faces of the race one is most familiar with - Kelly et al 2007

• Infants are initially able to discriminate pretty well between the faces they see
• They gradually become extremely good at distinguishing between the kinds of faces they see around them
• While gradually losing their abilities to discriminate between faces that they dont see often, or at all - Kelly et al 2007
• However, it is possible to retain the ability to distinguish between unfamiliar face types, by shaping the infant’s experience
• This has been shown through studies where parents read picture books to their infants (Heron-Delaney et al 2001)

Question 21

Perceptual narrowing with faces

Answer 21

6 month old Caucasian children were able to discriminate same and other race faces
9 month old caucasian babies shown a book with caucasian faces lost the ability to recognise chinese faces
9 month old caucasian babies shown a book with chinese faces retained the ability to recognise chinese faces

Face processing abilities are shaped by experience

This isnt unique to human faces

Book- training studies show infants can retain the ability to recognise individuals from other species (Pascalis et al 2005)

Question 22

When can sound be perceived in the womb?

Answer 22

Unlike vision, sound can be perceived in the womb prior to birth

Question 23

Hearing language

Answer 23

IDS isn’t a completely different way of speaking - its an exaggeration of existing patterns of speech in the language

Its thought to help infants to extract smaller chunks of language

IDS is an important first step in infants learning language

Question 24

Perceptual narrowing hearing

Answer 24

Infants gradually exchange their vast potential for processing all types of information in return for a swifter, greater expertise in processing the information they see most often in their environment

Infants show a preference for Infant-Directed Speech, rather than typical adult-like speech (Cooper and Aslin 1990)

They pay more attention to speech when it has a higher and wider pitch range

a common way of adapting your speech to have an exaggerated pitch, range and speech (also known as Motherese)

Question 25

How does hearing particularly speech perception become more specialised with age?

Answer 25

Infants are initially able to distinguish between phonemes that dont occur in their native language (Trehub 1976)

This ability narrows to sounds contained in their own language (Eimas et al 1971)

Question 26

From 26 weeks, what do foetuses show?

Answer 26

From 26 weeks, foetuses show changes in heart rate as a direct response to auditory stimuli

Question 27

Full term foetuses can recognise what?

Answer 27

Mothers voice

Question 28

How much auditory information do babies pick up in the womb?

Answer 28

Newborn infants preferred hearing the story read while they were in the womb

This was true even when stories were read by a stranger, and not the child’s mother

Babies not exposed to these stories while in the womb showed no preference

Understanding speech is a remarkably complex process requiring that we segment a continuous stream of sound into separate parts