Perception & Object Knowledge Flashcards
How old is an infant?
What do we consider a toddler?
Development increments of each?
Toddler: 1-24 months
- Devel every 3 months until 12 months
- Devel every 6 months from 12-24 months
Toddlers: 2+ years old
- Devel every year
What can you use to tell what a newborn infant can see?
Visual preference task
- Can infant tell if stripes are diff from grey space?
- If more looking at stripes, can distinguish them
- But becomes harder as stripes become more dense (a way to test for visual acuity)
Ways to test depth perception:
Looming response
Visual cliff paradigm (Motion parallax)
Looming response:
Image gets bigger, making it look like its going towards you
- Causes flinching reactions if have good depth perception (e.g. blinking at 10 months, raising arms/leaning back at 3 months)
- More response = Better depth perception = Higher acuity
Visual cliff paradigm:
- If child avoids walking off “cliff”, has good depth perception
- Motion parallax: Way checkered pattern looks depending on distance (if pattern is large, won’t move as much as small pattern)
How do the depth perception of kittens, newborn goats and rats compare to infants in the visual cliff paradigm?
Kittens and newborn goats have similar response as infant
Rats don’t show same response, most likely because they use whiskers to help w/ perception too
Newborn vs Infant face perception preferences
Newborns
Tend to look longer at:
- Faces than inverted faces
- Top-heavy stimuli then bottom-heavy stimuli
Tend to look equally long at:
- Top-heavy and scrambled faces
Infants (3 months)
- Prefer faces to non-faces
- Look at top-heavy, bottom-heavy and scrambled faces equally
Newborn vs infant (6 months) face perception w/ monkeys
Perceptual narrowing
Newborns:
- Look equally at upright human and monkey faces
- Preference for face-like stimuli is broad
Infants:
- Can distinguish primate faces
Perceptual narrowing: By 9 months, ability disappears
- Infants don’t have to practice distinguishing between monkeys so the ability is useless
Infant preferences in taste/smell and hearing
Taste/Smell:
- Preference for sweet flavours
- Recognize and prefer smell of mother’s milk
Hearing;
- Prefer human voice, mother’s voice, native language, and infant-directed speech
Cross-modal integration
Evidence in:
- Vision and touch
- Vision and sound
- Vision and proprioception
Combining senses to understand things better
Vision and touch:
- 1-month-olds recognize shape previously touched (looking more at pacifier matching shape they just sucked)
- Cured blind children initially struggled with touch-vision integration but learned quickly (shows not innate but can be learned quickly)
Vision and sound:
- 4-month-old infants prefer watching film that matches soundtrack they’re listening to (able to see what they’re watching as a whole)
- 3- and 4-month-olds attend more to speech synced w/ lip movements than out of sync (able to use one sense to change behav towards other sense)
Vision and proprioception:
- Newborns imitate facial gestures (shows they represent actions, retain them, and use cross-modal integration to reproduce them)
- But this may actually be innate releasing mechanism (sticking out tongue to what they find interesting than copying)
Explain the cradle mobile experiment for testing memory of causal events.
How does habituation affect this too?
2 months: Infant learn association between leg pulling and mobile moving for a day
- This wouldn’t be possible according to Piaget
- Infants remember for 14 days at 3-6 months
Reactivation: If experimented shakes mobile again to reactivate memory, memory lasts even longer
Habituation involves boredom over repeated stimuli, which shows recognition
- Shows procedural memory by 2 months (learning action-outcome association)
Testing if infants perceive cause-effect relationships w/ direct and delayed launching event
Only dishabituated to reverse direct condition (blue causes red to move instead of red causes blue)
Suggests:
- Infants form causal relationships of motion events and can discriminate them from non-causal events
- Assign causal roles (agent vs patient)
- Sensitive to necessity of contact between cause and effect
Causal perception and animacy
- Green rectangle to red ball
- Car moving cylinder vs person moving person
Habituated to strategy to get to ball
- If strategy or course suddenly changes, dishabituate
- Shows learning of rectangle’s goal
Dishabituate to no-contact events w/non-agents bcuz not possible
- No dishabituation to no-contact events w/ agent bcuz person can move whenever
Object segregation by:
- Common motion
- Features
Common motion:
- Also helps w/ occlusion (dishabituating to broken rod moving behind block)
- Larger occlusions, irregular shaped objects need more learning
Features:
- Use configural and physical knowledge to segregate objects (dishabituating to slinky attached to bottom and top of cylinder moving together)
- Can also resolve seemingly impossible events (slinky attached to top of cylinder is actually one object)
Piaget vs Core Knowledge view on object representation
Piaget: Only thing being represented is what is immediately available in sensorimotor system
Core Knowledge: Infants have abstract representations about objects and their properties
Give examples of experiments that test continuity and solidity in object representation
Truck and ramp paradigm:
- Tests solidity
- Dishabituate on truck going through block on track
Short vs tall rabbit events:
- Tests continuity
- Dishabituate to tall rabbit not being seen going past gap in wall
Object individuation:
- Tests continuity
- Dishabituate to one object appearing from behind two separate screens
How do infants use violation of expectation to test solidity, continuity, and support?
Look more at event that violates their expectations
- Also tests to see w/ smacking or dropping if they can reproduce impossible event
Convergent validity:
- Degree to which 2 theoretically related task are measuring the same concept
- Infant looking and action behav seem to capture same principle of VOE
