Perception and Motor Development in Infancy Flashcards
What methods are used to study infants?
- preferential-looking technique
- habituation
What typical infant behavior is utilized in the preferential-looking technique?
- infants looking longer at things they find interesting or rewarding
- interest in novelty
What is the habituation paradigm and how does it assess infants’ perception during infancy?
- 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
When does habituation occur? What causes dishabituation?
- 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
Are newborn babies able to smell, taste, and hear?*
- 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
When do infants reach adult-like visual acuity?
It approaches that of adults by age 8 months and reaches full adult acuity by 6 years of age
Why do young infants prefer to look at high contrast patterns versus low contrast patterns? What does this say about their visual acuity?
because they have poor contrast sensitivity
-need more contrast btw dark and light to see the difference
How could an infant’s visual acuity be tested using the preferential-looking task?
-can be estimated by comparing how long the baby looks at a striped pattern vs a plain gray square
How do young infants perceive objects?
- 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
Why are faces more important than other objects?
- 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
What are the two positions in the ongoing debate of infant face processing?
- 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
What does it mean that ‘face processing’ is a domain specific ‘module’ that is innate and does not develop from environmental interactions? *
- 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
How does the following view differ from the first: face processing is experience-expectant and activity dependent ability? *
- 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
What are the findings of the Pascalis et a. study and how do the relate to the debate? *
over the first year infants fine-tune their prototype of a face so that it reflects faces that are familiar in their environments
Do infants perceive object segregation in visual displays?
-yes, but only if the object behind is moving