Sensory & Motor Development 1

Question 1

What is the foetus?

Answer 1

Prior to birth

Question 2

At what stage is the neonate?

Answer 2

The first few days post-birth

Question 3

At what stage is infancy?

Answer 3

up to around 2 years

Question 4

At what stage is preschool?

Answer 4

around 2-4 years

Question 5

At what stage is childhood?

Answer 5

5 years -adolescence

Question 6

At what stage is adolescence?

Answer 6

around 12-18 years

Question 7

At what stage is adulthood?

Answer 7

18 years +

Question 8

How can researching infancy be a challenge?

Answer 8

• 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

Question 9

What methods do infants possess that we can take advantage of?

Answer 9

• Looking
• Grasping
• Sucking
• Crawling and eventually walking

Question 10

Outline sucking as a method of observing infants

Answer 10

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

Question 11

Outline looking as a method of observing infants

Answer 11

Shown a picture until they habituate, then shown an old and new picture
Measure how much they look at the new picture

Question 12

What can the proportion of time looking at the new picture tell us?

Answer 12

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)

Question 13

How do we check new borns are ok enough to take part in studies?

Answer 13

Using the APGAR scale
Appearance
Pulse
Grimace
Activity
Respiration
Scores of 8 or above are seen as being ok

Question 14

What is vision like in new borns?

Answer 14

Stuff looks fuzzy, can see light, shapes and movement. Not yet capable of fixation

Question 15

What is vision like at 1-2 months?

Answer 15

Can fixate objects, can distinguish high contrast colours (black/white)

Question 16

What is vision like at 4 months?

Answer 16

Depth perception and improved colour vision now apparent, can follow objects with eyes

Question 17

What is vision like at 8 months?

Answer 17

Visual range increases, can recognise people across a room

Question 18

What is vision like at age 1?

Answer 18

Vision similar to adult levels

Question 19

Outline Fantz’s study of face like stimuli

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Do infants still recognise their mothers face when olfactory cues are removed?

Answer 20

Yes they do and when inadvertent visual cues are controlled for
This is noteworthy as infant’s visual acuity is relatively poor

Question 21

What is perceptual narrowing?

Answer 21

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

Question 22

Outline the ‘other race’ effect

Answer 22

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

Question 23

When does the development of hearing happen?

Answer 23

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

Question 24

Outline evidence for hearing in the womb

Answer 24

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

Question 25

How does hearing develop with age?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

Outline motherese

Answer 26

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