Visual Development Flashcards

1
Q

Why focus on infancy?

A
  • 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
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2
Q

Can babies see from birth?

A
  • from birth, babies visually scan environment and pause to look at stuff
  • yes, they can see from birth
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3
Q

What are methods in infant research?

A
  • preferential looking paradigm
  • habituation paradigm
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4
Q

What is the preferential looking paradigm?

A
  • 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
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5
Q

What do infants prefer to look at? (preferential looking paradigm)

A
  • stimuli that are more complex
  • more saturated in colour
  • familiar, known
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6
Q

What is the habituation paradigm?

A
  • takes advantage of babies’ natural preference for novelty
  • assesses infants’ ability to discriminate between stimuli
  • 2 phases: habituation phase and test phase
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7
Q

What is the habituation phase?

A
  • 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
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8
Q

What is the test phase?

A
  • 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
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9
Q

What is visual acuity and how is it assessed?

A
  • 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
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10
Q

How is visual acuity at birth?

A
  • 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
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11
Q

Why do infants have poor visual acuity at birth?

A
  • due to immaturity of cone cells in infants’ retinas
  • cone cells: light sensitive neurons involved in seeing fine details and colours
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12
Q

When do infants obtain adult like visual acuity?

A

8 months

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13
Q

What colours can infants see at birth?

A
  • they see in grayscale
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14
Q

When does colour vision appear?

A
  • 2 months
  • can see red first
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15
Q

When do infants obtain adult like colour perception?

A
  • 5 months
  • due to maturity of cones and visual cortex
  • can discriminate between colour categories and between hues of the same colour
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16
Q

What is visual scanning like at birth?

A
  • 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
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17
Q

What is visual scanning like at 4 months?

A
  • able to smoothly track moving objects if moving slowly
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18
Q

What is visual scanning like at 8 months?

A
  • adult like visual scanning
  • can smoothly follow objects
  • improved visual scanning due to brain maturation
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19
Q

Why is visual scanning important?

A
  • because it’s one of the few ways that infants have control over what they observe and learn
  • first form of autonomy
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20
Q

What is face perception like at birth?

A
  • newborns show a preference for faces or face-like stimuli vs. non-face-like stimuli
21
Q

Why are infants drawn to faces?

A
  • fusiform face area
  • infants have a general bias/preference for stimuli that are more top-heavy vs. bottom-heavy
22
Q

What is the fusiform face area?

A
  • area in brain for recognizing and detecting faces
  • special innate face perception mechanism?
23
Q

What is infants’ face perception in relation to their mother?

A
  • infants very quickly learn to recognize and prefer their own mother’s face
  • just a few days after birth, babies prefer their mother’s face compared to another woman’s face
24
Q

What is a face specialist?

A
  • better at distinguishing between faces that are frequently experiences in their environment
  • can distinguish between 2 human faces but struggle to distinguish between 2 monkey faces
25
Q

When do infants become face specialists?

A
  • 9 months
26
Q

What is a face generalist?

A
  • equally good at distinguishing human AND monkey faces
27
Q

What is perceptual narrowing?

A
  • tuning of perceptual mechanisms to the specific sensory inputs that infants encounter in their daily life
  • improves perception of stimuli encountered often
  • decline in the ability to distinguish stimuli that are not present in the infant’s environment
  • present for several perceptual domains
  • result of synaptic pruning
28
Q

What is synaptic pruning?

A
  • elimination of synapses to increase the efficiency of neural communication
  • use it or lose it principle
  • neural connections being used are maintained while those not used are lost
29
Q

What is synaptogenesis?

A
  • formation of synapses between neurons
  • rapid synaptogenesis right after brith
  • results in hyper-connectivity in brain
  • more connections than we need
  • not efficient
30
Q

What is the evidence of perceptual narrowing in face perception?

A
  • infants becoming face specialists
  • infants demonstrate the other race effect
31
Q

What is the other race effect?

A
  • people find it easier to distinguish between faces of individuals from their own racial group than between faces from other racial groups
  • not innate
  • the exposure effect
  • during the first few months of life, 96% of faces that babies are exposed to are females from their own race
  • if infant is equally exposed to faces of different races, will not show other race effect
32
Q

When do infants demonstrate the other race effect?

A
  • 9 months
  • can only distinguish between faces of own race
33
Q

How is face perception impacted in infants with autism spectrum disorders?

A
  • people with ASD often have difficulty with face perception
  • prefer to not look at eyes
  • toddlers with ASD preferred looking at geometric shapes over pictures of people (opposite of typically developing kids)
  • infants’ preference for non-faces could be an early indicator that the infant will later be diagnosed with ASD
34
Q

What is perceptual constancy?

A
  • the perception of objects as being constant in size, shape, colour, etc in spite of physical differences in the retinal image of the object
35
Q

Is perceptual constancy present from birth?

A
  • yes, perceptual constancy is present from birth
  • realized cube was same even when at different distances
36
Q

What is object segregation?

A
  • the ability to identify that objects are separate from each other
  • separate by colour, shape, movement
37
Q

Is object segregation present from birth?

A
  • no, newborns do not have object segregation
  • object segregation is not innate, has to be learned with experience
38
Q

When do infants obtain object segregation?

A
  • 4 months
39
Q

What is binocular disparity?

A
  • most important depth cue
  • difference between the retinal image of an object in each eye that results in 2 slightly different signals being sent to the brain
  • visual cortex combines the differing neural signals caused by binocular disparity
40
Q

When can infants perceive depth (binocular depth cues)?

A
  • 4 months
  • depth perception relying on binocular disparity is present at 4 months
41
Q

What is a sensitive period?

A
  • a biological period during which certain kinds of experiences are necessary for an ability to develop normally
42
Q

What is the sensitive period for binocular vision?

A
  • from birth to 3 years
  • depth perception from cue of binocular disparity is a natural result of brain maturation as long as the infant receives normal visual input from both eyes
  • if infants do not receive normal binocular visual input until age 3, they may fail to develop normal binocular vision and have life-long difficulties with depth perception
43
Q

When can infants perceive monocular depth cues?

A
  • 6-7 months
44
Q

What is the visual cliff?

A
  • it assesses monocular depth cues
  • 6 month old will not crawl over visual cliff but younger children will
  • suggests that this aspect of depth perception needs to be developed through experience
45
Q

What is the visual development timeline?

A
  • at birth: rudimentary visual scanning, poor acuity, preference for high contrast, grayscale, preference for faces vs. non-faces, perceptual constancy
  • 2 months: colour vision appears
  • 4 months: object segregation and binocular depth perception appear
  • 5 months: adult-like colour perception
  • 6 months: face generalists, monocular depth perception appears
  • 8 months: adult-like visual scanning and visual acuity
  • 9 months: face specialists through perceptual narrowing
46
Q

What visual abilities are innate?

A
  • perceptual constancy
  • preference for top-heavy stimuli
47
Q

What visual abilities improve with brain maturation?

A
  • visual acuity
  • colour perception
  • visual scanning
48
Q

What visual abilities are experience dependent processes?

A
  • object segregation
  • face perception (perceptual narrowing)
  • depth perception (sensitivity period)