Sensory & Motor Development 1 Flashcards
What is the foetus?
Prior to birth
At what stage is the neonate?
The first few days post-birth
At what stage is infancy?
up to around 2 years
At what stage is preschool?
around 2-4 years
At what stage is childhood?
5 years -adolescence
At what stage is adolescence?
around 12-18 years
At what stage is adulthood?
18 years +
How can researching infancy be a challenge?
- They can’t talk
- They understand little or no language
- They’re often not capable of producing complex or organised behaviour
- They often can’t even move around
- They can get grumpy pretty quickly
What methods do infants possess that we can take advantage of?
- Looking
- Grasping
- Sucking
- Crawling and eventually walking
Outline sucking as a method of observing infants
Given a dummy to suck and a baseline sucking rate is established, then show infants a stimulus
- Sucking more = excited
- No change in sucking rate = not noticed anything different
Outline looking as a method of observing infants
Shown a picture until they habituate, then shown an old and new picture
Measure how much they look at the new picture
What can the proportion of time looking at the new picture tell us?
Can they tell that two things are different?
Can they remember the first picture?
What information have they encoded from the picture
This is know as the visual paired comparison task (VPC)
How do we check new borns are ok enough to take part in studies?
Using the APGAR scale Appearance Pulse Grimace Activity Respiration Scores of 8 or above are seen as being ok
What is vision like in new borns?
Stuff looks fuzzy, can see light, shapes and movement. Not yet capable of fixation
What is vision like at 1-2 months?
Can fixate objects, can distinguish high contrast colours (black/white)
What is vision like at 4 months?
Depth perception and improved colour vision now apparent, can follow objects with eyes
What is vision like at 8 months?
Visual range increases, can recognise people across a room
What is vision like at age 1?
Vision similar to adult levels
Outline Fantz’s study of face like stimuli
Showed a series of stimuli to young infants
From the first month infants showed a small but consistent preference for the face-like configuration
The same pattern is seen when presenting moving images to new borns, they follow face-like stimuli for longer
Do infants still recognise their mothers face when olfactory cues are removed?
Yes they do and when inadvertent visual cues are controlled for
This is noteworthy as infant’s visual acuity is relatively poor
What is perceptual narrowing?
Infant’s visual perception becomes increasingly tailored to regular features of the child’s environment
Very general abilities are more finely tuned following experience
Particularly seen with facial recognition
Face processing abilities are shaped by experience
Outline the ‘other race’ effect
Infants can discriminate pretty well between faces they see, they gradually become extremely good at distinguishing between the kinds of faces they see around them
While gradually losing the ability to discriminate between faces they don’t see often
When does the development of hearing happen?
Sound can be perceived in the womb prior to birth
From 26 weeks gestation, foetuses show changes in heart rate as a direct response to auditory stimuli
Also able to recognise the sound of their mother’s voice
Outline evidence for hearing in the womb
New born infants preferred to hear the story read while they were in the womb even when it was a stranger reading it not the mother
How does hearing develop with age?
It becomes more specialised with age
Infants are initially able to distinguish between phonemes that don’t occur in their native language
This ability narrows to sounds contained in their own language
Outline motherese
Infants show a preference for motherese rather than adult-like speech
They pay more attention to speech when it has a higher and wider pitch range
It isn’t a completely different way of speaking, its an exaggeration of existing patterns of speech in the language
