Sensation vs Perception Flashcards
Define sensation
The PROCESSING of BASIC INFORMATION from the external world by the sensory receptors in the sense organs and brain
Define perception
The process of ORGANISING and
INTERPRETING SENSORY INFORMATION about the objects, events, and spatial layout of our surrounding world
You walk into a kitchen and smell the scent of cinnamon rolls
Is this sensation or perception?
Sensation
You walk into a kitchen and smell the scent of cinnamon rolls which reminds you of the rolls your grandma used to make during Christmas time when you were younger
Is this sensation or perception?
Perception
This input is often ambiguous or incomplete
Is it a sensory or perception input?
Sensory input
This input organizes sensory input
into representations that the brain can use
Is it a sensory or perception input?
Perception
How did early research study perception in infants?
Early research simply measured how long infants would look at a visual stimuli
Give an example of earlier research which studied perception in infants
Fantz box (1950s)
1) Baby is presented with visual stimuli (pictures) including cartoon face, patterns, a solid colour, no colour etc.
2) Infant stared longer at the cartoon face compared to other stimuli
What did results from the Fantz box suggest about infants’ perception?
That infants could discriminate between stimuli using the preferential looking and habituation techniques
What are the modern ways to study sensation and perception in children?
1) Preferential-looking
2) Habituation
What is preferential-looking?
Involves showing infants two patterns or two objects at a time to see if the infants have a preference for one over the other
What test involves showing infants two patterns or two objects at a time to see if the infants have a preference for one over the other?
Preferential-looking test
What is habituation?
Involves repeatedly presenting an infant with a stimulus until their response declines
What test involves repeatedly presenting an infant with a stimulus until their response declines?
Habituation test
How might habituation help us study how infants sense and perceive things?
If infant dishabituates when they are presented with new, unfamiliar stimuli, researchers believe that the baby can discriminate between the old
and new stimuli
How do you test prenatal listening?
Operant conditioning
e.g. reward the infant with a particular sound according to their sucking pattern and measure which sound the child responds with to determine which reward they prefer
Who said this?
“The baby, assailèd by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion”
Simply = Baby is bombarded by a lot of information/stimuli and they get confused (chaotic)
William James
What can newborns see?
- Blurry (they don’t see as well as adults do)
- Their vision rapidly improves in the first few months
- Infants prefer to look at patterns
What can newborns see?
- Blurry (they don’t see as well as adults do)
- Their vision rapidly improves in the first few months
- Infants prefer to look at patterns
What do newborns experience in terms of their vision?
Visual acuity
Define visual acuity
The sharpness of visual discrimination
Simply = How sharply infants can see
How is visual acuity in infants measured?
Assessing infants’ preferences with specific patterns
e.g. An infant’s visual acuity can be estimated by comparing how long the baby looks at a striped pattern vs a plain grey square of the same size and brightness
We compare how long the baby looks at a striped pattern vs a plain grey square of the same size and brightness
What is this test trying to measure?
Infants’ visual acuity
When does infants’ visual acuity approach and become just as good as adults’ visual acuity?
Approach = By 8 months
Become = By 6 years old
How come the visual acuity of infants can be measured by the length of staring?
Because infants prefer to stare longer at patterns with high visual contrast (contrast sensitivity)
Define contrast sensitivity
The ability to tell the difference between light and dark areas in a visual pattern
At what age do infants prefer to look at patterns of high visual contrast?
Up to 2 months old
Why do infants up to 2 months old prefer to look at patterns of high visual contrast?
Because they have poor contrast sensitivity (poor ability to detect differences in light and dark areas)
Why do young infants up to 2 months old have poor contrast sensitivity (poor ability to detect differences in light and dark areas)?
Because infants’ cones (light receptors/light-sensitive cells in the fovea area of the eye that helps us see colour) are much more immature, sparsely populated and further apart compared to adult cones
What are the 2 types of cells in the eye?
1) Rods = Light sensitive
2) Cones = Colour sensitive
Newborns have about ……. vision
a. 20/120
b. 10/120
c. 50/120
d. 60/ 120
a. 20/120
At what age do infants start to have good colour vision (ability to see colour) that is similar to adults?
By 2-3 months old
What is scanning?
The process of moving your eyes around something stationary
At what age do infants scan only the perimeters of a shape?
At 1 month old
At what age do infants scan both the perimeters and interiors of a shape?
At 2 months old
What is tracking?
The process of moving your eyes smoothly, following a moving object, without moving your head
At what age do infants begin scanning the environment?
As soon as they were born
At what age do infants begin tracking things in the environment (even slowly moving objects)?
About 2-3 months old
What kind of visual stimuli/shape intrigues infants the most?
Faces
Why are infants drawn to faces compared to other shapes?
Infants have a general bias toward configurations with more elements in the
upper half than in the lower half (Top-heavy shapes)
When do infants start preferring their mother’s own face?
At about only 12 cumulative hours of exposure to the mother’s face (Bushnell, 1998)
At what age do infants’ visual attention stops being influenced by top-heavy bias?
By 3 months old
Who proposed that 6-month-olds are better at distinguishing between different monkey faces than adults and 9-month-olds?
Pascalis et al. (2002)
How come Pascalis et al.’s study found that 6-month-olds are better at distinguishing between different monkey faces than adults and 9-month-olds?
Because the study made caregivers of the 6-month-olds show pictures of monkeys regularly to the infants
After some time, infants are used to the monkey faces and can quickly tell the difference between 2 monkey faces
At what age do infants prefer female faces (unless the primary caregiver is male)?
By around 3 months old (Quinn et al., 2002)
Why do infants prefer female faces (unless the primary caregiver is male) by around 3 months old?
Because a majority of infants have a female primary caregiver
The more often the infant sees the face of their female primary caregiver, the more likely they will develop a preference for a female
(they evelop a preference for the type of face they see most often)
At what age will infants develop a preference for the type of face they see most often AND also, come to understand the significance of different facial expressions?
At 4-5 months old
Do infants look longer at attractive faces or less attractive faces?
Attractive faces
Who proposed that infants interact more
positively with people with attractive faces?
Langlois et al.
Describe Langlois et al.’s study on the effects of facial attractiveness on infant preferences
1) 12-month-old children were either presented with an attractive or an unattractive woman
(the same woman but with different mask/makeup)
2) The woman plays with the child
3) It was found that the child is more responsive to the attractive woman
At what age can infants analyze and integrate separate elements of a visual display into a coherent pattern?
At 2 months old
Define subjective contour
In a Kaniza arrangement, people can see an illusory border of a shape even though the border itself does not exist
e.g. Adults view an image as a white square on top of 4 pink circles (they can see an illusory contour of the square shape even though the contour does not exist)
According to Bertenthal et al., at what age can children see the overall pattern and detect the illusory square?
At 7 months old
When do infants show less interest in the shape with an illusory square?
Only when they habituate to the shape with the square will they only prefer a new shape (Ghim, 1990)
Define perceptual constancy
The tendency for us to see familiar objects as having standard shape, size, colour, or location regardless of changes in the angle of perspective or distance.
Simply = When you see two of the same objects that are at different angles/distances (1 further away and 1 closer to you) you would still believe that the shapes are of the same size
Who conducted the perceptual constancy study?
Slater et al.
What were Slater et al.’s suggestions on infants’ perceptual constancy?
If an infant looks at the larger, but further away cube, researchers will conclude the child has size constancy
This indicates that the infant saw the cube that was further away as a different size than the cube that was closer
What did Slater et al.’s study on infants’ perceptual constancy suggest?
Newborns see familiar objects as having standard shape, size, colour, or location regardless of changes in the angle of perspective, distance, or lighting
Define object segregation
The identification of separate objects in a visual array (perception of boundaries between objects)
An infant is confused about whether a teacup on a small plate is one object or two separate objects. But once their mother picked up the cup, leaving the plate behind, the infant is aware that they are 2 separate objects
What is this an example of?
Object segregation
Who proposed that movement is important for object segregation?
Kellman & Spelke
Describe Kellman & Spelke’s object segregation experiment
1) Infants are presented with 2 separate objects, a rod moving back and forth behind a box
2) After habituating to the display, infants are presented with one single rod and 2 rods
3) Infants stared longer (dishabituated) at the 2 rods rather than 1 rod, suggesting they have object segregation as they find the single rod familiar but the 2 rods unfamiliar
4) But infants who were first presented with 2 separate objects without movement, a rod staying still behind a box, stared longer at both the single rod and 2 rods
Define optical expansion
When a visual image of an object looks like it’s increasing in size as it comes closer to us
At what age do infants start responding to optical expansion?
Infants as young as 1-month-old
What did Ball and Tronick suggest about infants’ response to optical expansion?
One-month-old infants will blink defensively at an object that appears to be heading towards them
Why do infants blink when an object is nearing them?
- They blink because they can’t dodge
- They think the ball is going to hit them as they see the ball getting larger as it approaches
What term is used to describe the process by which the visual cortex combines the differing neural signals caused by binocular disparity (the
slightly different signals sent to the brain by the two eyes)?
Stereopsis
Define stereopsis
When you look at an object and each eye sees it from a slightly different angle (because the retinal image of the object in each eye sends 2 different signals to the brain)
According to Held et al., at what age does stereopsis emerge in infants?
Emerges suddenly at around 4 months old
At what age do infants become sensitive to a variety of monocular or pictorial cues, the perceptual cues of depth that can be achieved by one eye alone?
About 6-7 months old
Infants believe that the larger the size of something, the…
- Further
- Closer
Closer
Describe Yonas et al.’s monocular depth experiment to test depth perception
1) A 7-month-old infant wears an eye patch as a way to only use their monocular depth cue of
relative size
- Wearing an eye patch takes away binocular depth information
2) The infant is presented with an Ames Window (basically a model that has one long side and one shorter side)
3) The infant, whilst wearing the eye patch, seems to prefer reaching the longer side of a trapezoidal window/ Ames window
4) This behaviour indicates that the infant sees the longer side as nearer, and hence
more readily reachable
What does the Ames window experiment suggest about children’s depth perception?
The infant sees the longer side of the Ames window as nearer, and hence more readily reachable
Before infants reach about 19 months old, they have substantial experience with pictures
Infants and toddlers attempt to treat pictures like they were…..?
Real objects
Why do infants younger than 19 months treat pictures like real objects?
Because they can’t differentiate between 2D and 3D yet
At what age do children reach the same hearing levels as an adult?
5 or 6 years of age
Define auditory localisation
When you turn your head towards a sound
At what age do children show signs of auditory localisation?
Newborns
- Newborns turn their heads towards the direction of sounds
- But they struggle to determine where exactly the sound is coming from
Are infants are proficient in perceiving subtle differences in human speech?
Yes
Who proposed a study on infants’ perception of music?
Butt and Kisilevsky (2000)
Describe Butt and Kisilevsky’s study on infants’ perception of music
1) Heel lance procedure (making a pinprick puncture in one heel of the newborn to collect their blood) on premature infants 31 weeks GA
2) Heart rate increases during heel lance procedure
3) Heart rate returned to normal more quickly when playing Brahms lullaby (regardless of instrument)
4) However, the phenomenon does not apply to infants <31 weeks GA
What did Corbeil et al. suggest about singing to infants?
That singing keeps infants 7-10 months
calm for twice as long as speech/talking
e.g. It is better to sing twinkle twinkle little star than simply recite/say it
What did Trainor & Heinmiller suggest about infants’ music preferences?
Infants share the strong preferences adults have for some “pleasing” music sounds over others
What kind of music do infants respond to, according to Krumhansl & Jusczyk?
- Infants respond to RHYTHM and TEMPO in music
They prefer music that had pauses between musical phrases rather than in the middle
Apart from being sensitive to tempo and rhythm, what else are infants sensitive to when it comes to music, according to Chang & Trehub?
- Infants are also sensitive to melody
- They show habituation to the same tune regardless of changes to the pitch
What kind of taste do infants prefer?
Sweet
What did DeSnoo do to test for preference for sweetness in prenatal infants?
1) There were 2 conditions:
Condition 1 = A dye + sweetener mixture was injected into a pregnant mother’s amniotic fluid
Condition 2 = Only the dye was injected into a pregnant mother’s amniotic fluid
2) When mothers are told to pee, it was found that there was more dye present in the urine of mothers injected with dye + sweetener than just dye
Who claimed that newborn infants prefer the smell of their “own” amniotic fluid relative to than of another baby?
Marlier et al. (1998)
What did Marlier et al. claim about newborn infants’ preference towards scent?
Newborn infants prefer the smell of their “own” amniotic fluid relative to than of another baby
Who conducted an experiment on rats to investigate whether Marlier’s claim was true regarding preference for infant’s own amniotic fluid smell?
Teicher & Blass (1977)
Describe Teicher & Blas’s newborn rat experiment
1) Right after birth, the mother rat is washed and there is no longer a distinct scent of amniotic fluid
2) Baby rats struggled to navigate their way to the mother rat for food
- Amniotic fluid promotes post-birth
feeding behaviour in RATS - Baby rats navigate to the mother rat for feeding very soon after birth
- If mother rat is washed immediately
after birth – pups don’t find food
source
At what age do infants develop sensitivity to taste and smell?
Before birth
According to Marlier & Schall, when do infants start preferring the smell of breast milk?
At 3-4 days after birth regardless of whether they have been breastfed or bottle fed
According to MacFarlane, at what age do infants start to differentiate their mother’s scent from other women’s scents?
By 2 weeks of age
Who conducted an experiment to test for the expression of taste in newborns?
Rosenstein & Oster, 1988
What were the 4 types of tastes Rosenstein & Oster tested on infants in their study of investigating the expression of taste in newborns?
1) Neutral stimulus (water)
2) Sweet stimulus
3) Sour stimulus
4) Bitter stimulus
How do infants learn about the environment?
Active touch
- Starts off with oral exploration
- Then gain control over hands and arms to make movements and manual exploration
At what age do infants gain greater control over their hand and arm movements, and manual exploration gradually takes precedence over oral exploration?
Around 4 months old
Define intermodal perception
The act of combining information from 2 or more sensory systems
What did Spelke discover about intermodal perception in infants?
When two videos are presented simultaneously, 4- month-old infants prefer to watch the images that correspond to the sounds they are hearing
When two videos are presented simultaneously, 4- month-old infants prefer to watch the images that correspond to the sounds they are hearing
What is this an example of?
Intermodal perception
According to Walker-Andrews, at what age do infants associate facial expressions with emotion in voices?
By 5 months old
Describe Streri & Spelke’s experiment investigating intermodal perception in infants
1) Infants held two rings, one in each hand, under a cloth that prevented them from seeing the rings or their own bodies
- For some infants, the rings were connected by a rigid bar and therefore moved together
- For others, the rings were connected by a flexible cord and therefore moved independently
2) All infants were allowed to hold and feel just one type of ring until they had largely lost interest (habituated)
3) They were then shown both types of rings and looked longer at the rings that were different from those they had been exploring with their hands
Why do very young infants have poor sensitivity to visual contrast?
A. The fovea is underdeveloped
B. The rods in the eye are more spaced out than in adults
C. The visual cortex is underdeveloped
D. None of the above
A. The fovea is underdeveloped
Which of the following statements is true about infants’ visual perception of depth?
A. Infants use optical expansion to perceive depth before stereoptic vision
B. Infants use stereoptic vision to perceive depth before optical expansion
C. Newborn infants use both optical expansion and stereoptic vision to perceive depth
D. Neither optical expansion nor stereoptic vision are related to depth perception
A. Infants use optical expansion to perceive depth before stereoptic vision
Jane is three days old and has only ever been bottle-fed with formula milk. Jane is likely to:
A. Prefer the smell of formula milk over the smell of breast milk
B. Prefer the smell of breast milk over the smell of formula milk
C. Prefer the milk that is presented on her usual feeding side, regardless of what it smells like
D. Show no preference for the smell of either formula milk or breast milk
B. Prefer the smell of breast milk over the smell of formula milk
Which of the following statements about intermodal perception is true?
A. Infants can recognise objects through sight they have previously only experienced through touch
B. Infants can combine experience from sight and sound into one representation
C. Infants can associate facial expressions with emotions in voices
D. All of the above
D. All of the above
