Visual Development (class 1) Flashcards

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1
Q

What does it mean to be a child?

A

To be dependent on adult caregivers

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2
Q

How human childhood compare to that of primates?

A

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.

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3
Q

What are the two hypothesis as to why human childhoods are so long?

A
  1. Large-brain narrow-hips tradeoff
  2. Being born not fully formed allows for more learning
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4
Q

What is the large-brain narrow-hips tradeoff?

A

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.

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5
Q

What is the hypothesis, “being born not fully formed allows for more learning”?

A

Being born earlier maximizes the ability to learn, allows more time to acquire information about the world rather than being useful.

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6
Q

What aspects of childhood demonstrate that children are adapted to focus on learning

A

Children are: highly curious, highly suggestible, readily imitate others, overestimate own abilities and malleable brains.

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7
Q

What is Child Development?

A

Process of learning of perceptual, cognitive, emotional and social abilities about raising children

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8
Q

What do babies see at birth?

A

Babies are able to scan their environment and pause to look at things

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9
Q

What are the two methods in infant research?

A
  1. Preferential-looking paradigm
  2. Habituation paradigm
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10
Q

What is preferential looking paradigm?

A

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

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11
Q

What do babies find interesting?

A

Stimulus that are more complex, saturated and familiar

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12
Q

What is the habituation paradigm?

A

Paradigm that takes advantage of babies preference for novelty (when habituated)

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13
Q

What happens in the habituation phase?

A

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)

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14
Q

What happens in the test phase?

A

Infants are presented with the habituated (familiar) stimulus and a novel stimulus. Preference for the novel stimuli is indicated by greater looking time.

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15
Q

What is visual acuity?

A

The sharpness of visual discrimination

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16
Q

How is visual acuity assessed? With what paradigm?

A

By using preferential looking paradigm

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17
Q

Give an example of visual acuity study?

A

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/

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18
Q

How is color perception at birth?

A

Infants see in gray scale

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19
Q

How is color perception at 2 months old?

A

Color vision appears

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20
Q

How is color perception at 5 months old?

A

Adult-like color perception

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21
Q

Why does adult-like color perception happen at 5 months old?

A

Due to maturity of cones and V1

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22
Q

What is the first color children can perceive?

A

Red

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23
Q

How is visual scanning at birth?

A

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

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24
Q

How is visual scanning at 4 months old like?

A

Infants are able to smoothly tract moving objects

25
Q

How is visual scanning at 8 months like?

A

They have adults-like visual scanning and can smoothly follow objects

26
Q

What are the two possible explanations as to why infants are drawn to faces?

A
  1. Special innate face perception mechanism
  2. More generalized mechanism
27
Q

What study was performed concerning face perception and top-heavy faces?

A

Using a preferential looking paradigm, researchers showed infants regular faces, upside down faces, scramble top-heavy faces and scrambled bottom heavy faces. Infants preferred both upright faces and scrambled top-heavy faces, even preferred scrambled top-heavy faces. This indicates that infants have a preference for top-heavy stimulus = no innate face hypothesis

28
Q

Do infants have a preference for mother’s face?

A

Yes, infants quickly learn to recognize and prefer their mother’s face compared to another woman’s face. Infants also have other ways to recognize parents, such as smell and voice.

29
Q

Are infants face specialists?

A

Yes, over the 1st year of life, infants become face specialists and are better at distinguishing between familiar faces than less frequent faces.

30
Q

What is the other-race-effect in children

A

Infants find it easier to distinguish between faces of individuals from their own races than others.

31
Q

What study was done on other-race-effect?

A

Researchers recruited Caucasian, black and Chinese children who were habituated to faces of their own race vs. other race. Then they were presented with a habituated face and a new face. Infants under 3 months old could easily distinguish between faces of all races. Whereas at 9 months old, they were better at distinguishing faces from their own race

32
Q

Is the other-race-effect innate?

A

No, rather it is caused by the exposure effect. If infants are exposed to many races they will not show this effect.

33
Q

What is perceptual narrowing?

A

The tuning of perceptual mechanisms to the specific sensory inputs that infants encounter in their daily life. Makes familiar stimuli more precise, but also means they have fewer abilities to distinguish unfamiliar stimulus.

34
Q

What causes perceptual narrowing?

A

Synaptic pruning

35
Q

What is perceptual pruning

A

The elimination of synapses to increase efficiency of neural communication.

36
Q

What is synaptogenesis? When does it happen?

A

Formation of synapses between neurons right after birth, causes hyper-connectivity

37
Q

How is face perception in children with ASD?

A

Children with ASD often have difficulty with face perception and prefer not to look at eyes. Rather, they prefer to look at geometric shapes over pictures of people.

38
Q

What is perceptual constancy?

A

Perception of objects as being constant in size, color, shapes in spite of physical differences in retinal images of the object (different location)

39
Q

What causes perceptual constancy?

A

Automatic perceptual constancy

40
Q

What was the study done on perceptual constancy in infants?

A

Habituation paradigm: cube repeatedly shown to infants at different distances. In the test phase: infants were shown the original cube and a larger identical cube, which was farther away so that both cubes projected the same-sized retinal image. Result: infants looked longer at the larger but further away cube, indicating that they understand that both cubes are different, meaning they saw the original cube as a single object of a constant size. Suggest that perceptual constancy is present from birth.

41
Q

What is object segregation?

A

Ability to identify that objects are separate from each other. Movement is an important cue to segregation

42
Q

What study was performed on object segregation?

A

Study with newborns and 4 months old. Habituation: infants repeatedly watched video of a rod moving side-to-side behind a box. Test: children were shown 2 rods (one complete and one separated). Result: 4 months old preferred to look at the broken rods, suggest that they view the initial rod as a continuous object. The newborns did not have a preference, indicates that they did not understand object segregation.

43
Q

According to this study, is object segregation innate?

A

It appears that object segregation is not innate, rather it has to be learned with experience and relies on visual scanning improvements.

44
Q

What is binocular disparity?

A

The difference between the retinal image of an object in each eye that results in two slightly different signals being sent to the brain

45
Q

When is the sensitive period for binocular vision?

A

From birth to age 3

46
Q

What happens if a child doesn’t develop binocular vision in the first 3 years of life?

A

Life-long difficulties with depth perception

47
Q

What are monocular depth cues?

A

Depth cues perceived with one eye only

48
Q

At what age does monocular depth perception happen?

A

At 6 months old

49
Q

At birth, what visual development abilities are present?

A

Rudimentary visual scanning, poor acuity, preference for high contrast, gray scale vision, preference for faces and perceptual constancy

50
Q

At 2 months of age, what visual development abilities are present?

A

Color vision

51
Q

At 4 months of age, what visual development abilities are present?

A

Object segregation and binocular depth perception

52
Q

At 5 month of age, what visual development abilities are present?

A

Adult-like color perception

53
Q

At 6 months of age, what visual development abilities are present?

A

Face generalists and monocular depth perception.

54
Q

At 8 months of age, what visual development abilities are present?

A

Adult-like visual scanning and visual acuity

55
Q

At 9 months of age, what visual development abilities are present?

A

Face specialists through perceptual narrowing

56
Q

What aspects of visual development innate?

A

Perceptual constancy and preference for top-heavy stimuli

57
Q

What aspects of visual development are improved with brain maturity?

A

Visual acuity, color perception and visual scanning

58
Q

What aspects of visual development are dependent on experience?

A

Object segregation, face perception and depth perception