Perception and Motor Development in Infancy Flashcards

1
Q

What methods are used to study infants?

A
  • preferential-looking technique

- habituation

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2
Q

What typical infant behavior is utilized in the preferential-looking technique?

A
  • infants looking longer at things they find interesting or rewarding
  • interest in novelty
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3
Q

What is the habituation paradigm and how does it assess infants’ perception during infancy?

A
  • involves repeatedly presenting an infant with a given stimulus until the response decline s
  • in infant’s response increases when a novel stimulus is presented, we can infer that the baby can discriminate btw the old and new stimuli
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4
Q

When does habituation occur? What causes dishabituation?

A
  • habituation: occurs when we learn not to respond to a stimulus that is presented repeatedly without change, punishment, or reward.
  • dishabituation: occurs when we respond to an old stimulus as if it were new again
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5
Q

Are newborn babies able to smell, taste, and hear?*

A
  • Newborns can taste and smell and will favor sweet tastes over bitter ones. For example, a newborn will choose to suck on a bottle of sweetened water, but will turn away or cry if given something bitter or sour to taste.
  • Likewise, newborns will turn toward smells they favor and turn away from bad odors

– Taste preference develops over the years

  • at birth babies can hear basic frequencies, however, they cannot hear high or low frequencies

– it may take up to 6 months until babies can hear and understand a range of sounds

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6
Q

When do infants reach adult-like visual acuity?

A

It approaches that of adults by age 8 months and reaches full adult acuity by 6 years of age

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7
Q

Why do young infants prefer to look at high contrast patterns versus low contrast patterns? What does this say about their visual acuity?

A

because they have poor contrast sensitivity

-need more contrast btw dark and light to see the difference

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8
Q

How could an infant’s visual acuity be tested using the preferential-looking task?

A

-can be estimated by comparing how long the baby looks at a striped pattern vs a plain gray square

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9
Q

How do young infants perceive objects?

A
  • Newborns perfer geometrical, non face like stimuli with more elements in the upper part over stimuli in which more elements are in the lower part
  • babies like top heavy diagrams/faces
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10
Q

Why are faces more important than other objects?

A
  • Babies prefer faces that they’ve seen before and from birth
  • infants are drawn to faces; from paying attention to real faces, the infant comes to recognize and prefer his or her own mother’s face after about only 12 cumulative hours of exposure
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11
Q

What are the two positions in the ongoing debate of infant face processing?

A
  • a neural domain specific for face recognition is innate, present at birth, and does not develop
  • face recognition is based on experience and takes over months and years to develop & be specialize
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12
Q

What does it mean that ‘face processing’ is a domain specific ‘module’ that is innate and does not develop from environmental interactions? *

A
  • It means that there is a region in the brain SPECIFIC to face processing
  • It is innate, it does not develop it is always present.
  • The ability to recognize faces is present at birth
  • Hypothesis: neural architecture for face recognition is present at birth
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13
Q

How does the following view differ from the first: face processing is experience-expectant and activity dependent ability? *

A
  • Baby is born with neural structure that would make it likely that they would recognize faces
  • But since faces are interesting babies pay a lot of attention to them, leading to a development of face recognition capacity
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14
Q

What are the findings of the Pascalis et a. study and how do the relate to the debate? *

A

over the first year infants fine-tune their prototype of a face so that it reflects faces that are familiar in their environments

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15
Q

Do infants perceive object segregation in visual displays?

A

-yes, but only if the object behind is moving

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16
Q

What is perceptual constancy?

A

The perception of object as being of constant size, shape, color, etc., in spite of physical differences in the retinal image of the object

17
Q

How does motion impact perceptual constancy (Wood & Wood, 2018)

A

newborn chicks require smooth movement to identify objects

18
Q

How is depth perception assessed in infancy?

A
  • visual expansion

- retinal disparity

19
Q

What visual cues influence depth perception, and at what ages do these cues become useful?

A
  • At about 6-7 months of age, infants become sensitive to a variety of the perceptual cues of depth that can be achieved by one eye alone
  • E.g., size and interposition
20
Q

How does motor development affect depth perception?

A

-depending on the baby being a novice crawler vs an experienced crawler

21
Q

What is attention and how does it influence perception?*

A

processes that allow people to control input from the environment and regulate behavior

-attentional processes serve the turner function in filtering information selectively for further processing that finally leads to perception

22
Q

What symptoms characterize attention-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)?*

A
  • overactivity
  • inattention
  • impulsivity
  • problems w/ academic performance, getting along w/ peers
23
Q

what are risk factors for ADHD?*

A
  • genes put some children at risk for ADHD by affecting the alerting & executive networks of attention and the brain structures that support those networks
  • prenatal exposure to alcohol & other drugs