Perceptual Development Flashcards
Theoretical Issues in the Study of
Perception
The Nature and Nurture of Perceptual
Development
- Chaotic experience.
- Mind as a blank slate.
- Random and meaningless information.
- Constructive process. : actively building up knowledge through there experiment (piaget)
- Organization given at birth, experience refines.
Visual Perception: A cyclopean image
The Nature and Nurture of
Perceptual Development
- Creating understanding from
experience. - Innate aspects of
perception. - Combination of nature and
nurture. - A** cyclopean image:** having two eyes close together allows infants to see one image .
Theoretical Issues in the Study of Perception
The Nature and Nurture of Perceptual Development:
- Biases at Birth
– Figure Ground
– Contrast
– Edges
– But is there more?
measure perception
with visual preference
-habituation:look for shorter time at old thing
visual paired comperacion: infants familirize with stimulus, and then measure how long they look at the familiar vs new stimulus
Theoretical Issues in the Study of Perception
The Nature and Nurture of Perceptual Development:
- Experience Expectant(nature)
– Will see faces
– Sounds & Sights of Nature (e.g. water) - Experience Dependent(nurture)
– What types of faces? Which individuals?
– What kind of landscape? What kinds of trees?
Historical Views:
What do babies perceive?
- William James, 1890, “Principles of Psychology” the baby experiences the world as a “Blooming, buzzing,
confusion” - A radical empiricist approach
- Blank slate (tabula rasa – remember John Locke), that experience must write on
- Since the 1960’s, we have known that not to be true
- Fantz (1958, 1961, 1963) developed procedures to test infant perception
– Visual preference (see next slide)
– Habituation (as before, and as later)
visual acuity
amount of detail you can see
The development of visual acuity
- Preferential looking: Visual (grating) Acuity
– Infants prefer patterned over grey(David Teller)
– When lines too close together, no preference(they become a blur
visual accuiticy in infants
is extremely poor, they can only see very few details
infants visual accuitacy gets better repedly throughthere 1 year(just not perfect)
Effects of Experience:The Development of Visual Acuity?
- Improvement of vision in infants
- Is it all maturational? Experience Expectant? Experience dependent?
- Experiment on children with cataracts.
– Acuity recovers when cataracts removed – 1 hour = 1 month (robust to lack of input for many months)
-Configural face processing, and other aspects of stereoscopic vision do not, even if cataract removed as early as 1 month, so that process experience expectant
Color vision
infants color is not the same as adults from birth (4month) - but they do see color
can only see bright coors in big patches, also contrast of color(not similar ones)
children born in places and season with less color have a lower color perception the warmer places
death perception
- gibson experiment
- visual cliff
- result: we learn depth perception
- as new cralwers were less put of by the cliff then older crawlers
- problem we cant mesure depth if they dont crawl(so they might have it earlier on)
An innate preference for faces
- Preferential Looking
– Show two patterns side-by-
side, measure duration of
fixation
– Preference implies
discrimination
- Example: Faces
– More complex patterns: faces,
bull’s eye - Infants prefer complex patterns to plain patterns
Basic Visual Abilities:
Color Vision
- Color perception at birth.
- Light of different wavelengths.
- Photoreceptors on retina.
- By 4 months infants see color like adults
Basic Visual Abilities:Depth Perception
- Critical for navigation.
- Task of visual cliff.-
- Infants pass around time
of crawling - Is depth perception
learned? - Or is it innate, with
learning to crawl
triggering its expression?
is refined by crawling but maybe crawling triigers depth perspetion
