Visual Development Flashcards
Why focus on infancy?
- very rapid changes in the first 2 years of life
- changes in one area enable changes in other areas
- methods of studying infants are different than methods for studying older children that can communicate more clearly with adults
- sheds light on how nature and nurture shape development
Can babies see from birth?
- from birth, babies visually scan environment and pause to look at stuff
- yes, they can see from birth
What are methods in infant research?
- preferential looking paradigm
- habituation paradigm
What is the preferential looking paradigm?
- assesses infants’ preference for one stimulus over another
- present the baby with 2 stimuli beside each other at the same time
- if the baby looks longer at one stimulus than the other, it means that they can distinguish between the two and have a preference for one over the other
- use eye tracking
What do infants prefer to look at? (preferential looking paradigm)
- stimuli that are more complex
- more saturated in colour
- familiar, known
What is the habituation paradigm?
- takes advantage of babies’ natural preference for novelty
- assesses infants’ ability to discriminate between stimuli
- 2 phases: habituation phase and test phase
What is the habituation phase?
- repeatedly present infant with a stimulus until they habituate to it
- reduced or stopped response to a stimulus
- looks at it less
- wait for infant to get bored
What is the test phase?
- present habituated, old, stimulus with a new stimulus
- dishabituation: if the baby shows greater interest in/looks longer at the new stimulus, they can tell the difference between the two
- if the baby looks at stimuli equally, they can’t tell the difference between stimuli
What is visual acuity and how is it assessed?
- sharpness of visual discrimination
- assessed by using preferential looking paradigm
- Infants presented with a succession of paddles with increasingly narrower stripes and narrower gaps between them until infant can no longer distinguish between stripped paddle and plain gray one
How is visual acuity at birth?
- at birth, infants have poor visual acuity
- prefer to look at patterns with high visual contrast
- don’t discriminate between stimuli with lower contrast sensitivities
- blurry, grayscale
Why do infants have poor visual acuity at birth?
- due to immaturity of cone cells in infants’ retinas
- cone cells: light sensitive neurons involved in seeing fine details and colours
When do infants obtain adult like visual acuity?
8 months
What colours can infants see at birth?
- they see in grayscale
When does colour vision appear?
- 2 months
- can see red first
When do infants obtain adult like colour perception?
- 5 months
- due to maturity of cones and visual cortex
- can discriminate between colour categories and between hues of the same colour
What is visual scanning like at birth?
- infants scan their visual environment and pause to look at something
- but trouble tracking moving stimuli because eye movements are jerky, eye muscles not fully developed
What is visual scanning like at 4 months?
- able to smoothly track moving objects if moving slowly
What is visual scanning like at 8 months?
- adult like visual scanning
- can smoothly follow objects
- improved visual scanning due to brain maturation
Why is visual scanning important?
- because it’s one of the few ways that infants have control over what they observe and learn
- first form of autonomy