Visual Development (class 1) Flashcards
What does it mean to be a child?
To be dependent on adult caregivers
How human childhood compare to that of primates?
Humans have the longest childhood among primates. By 4 weeks old, chimps can lift their head up, something that takes infants 6 months to do.
What are the two hypothesis as to why human childhoods are so long?
- Large-brain narrow-hips tradeoff
- Being born not fully formed allows for more learning
What is the large-brain narrow-hips tradeoff?
Human brains are very large and neuron dense, and necessitate bigger heads. At the same time, bipedalism also favours narrower hips. To solve this conflict, babies evolved to be born earlier and therefore necessitate longer childhood.
What is the hypothesis, “being born not fully formed allows for more learning”?
Being born earlier maximizes the ability to learn, allows more time to acquire information about the world rather than being useful.
What aspects of childhood demonstrate that children are adapted to focus on learning
Children are: highly curious, highly suggestible, readily imitate others, overestimate own abilities and malleable brains.
What is Child Development?
Process of learning of perceptual, cognitive, emotional and social abilities about raising children
What do babies see at birth?
Babies are able to scan their environment and pause to look at things
What are the two methods in infant research?
- Preferential-looking paradigm
- Habituation paradigm
What is preferential looking paradigm?
Way to assess infant’s preference for one thing over another. Infants are presented with two stimulus, if they look longer at one stimulus, we assume that they can distinguish between two stimuli and they look at the one they prefer
What do babies find interesting?
Stimulus that are more complex, saturated and familiar
What is the habituation paradigm?
Paradigm that takes advantage of babies preference for novelty (when habituated)
What happens in the habituation phase?
Researchers repeatedly present infants with a stimulus until they are habituated to it (reduce response to stimulus, wait for infants to be bored then take it away and re-show it to infant)
What happens in the test phase?
Infants are presented with the habituated (familiar) stimulus and a novel stimulus. Preference for the novel stimuli is indicated by greater looking time.
What is visual acuity?
The sharpness of visual discrimination
How is visual acuity assessed? With what paradigm?
By using preferential looking paradigm
Give an example of visual acuity study?
Infants presented with a succession of paddles with increasingly narrower stripes and narrower gaps between them until the infants can no longer distinguish between a stripped paddle and a plain grey one. At birth, infants have poor visual acuity so they prefer to look at high contrast patter and they don’t discriminate between stimuli with lower contrast sensitivities/
How is color perception at birth?
Infants see in gray scale
How is color perception at 2 months old?
Color vision appears
How is color perception at 5 months old?
Adult-like color perception
Why does adult-like color perception happen at 5 months old?
Due to maturity of cones and V1
What is the first color children can perceive?
Red
How is visual scanning at birth?
From birth, infants scan their visual environment and pause to look at things, however they have trouble tracking moving stimuli because their eyes movements are jerky