W4 - Lecture Flashcards
What did Robert Fantz (1961) discover about infant visual preferences?
Infants as young as a week old prefer: Bull’s-eye patterns over striped patterns, Checkerboard patterns over plain squares, Schematic faces over any other stimulus.
Why was Fantz (1961) important for visual perception research?
It provided the first evidence that infants can distinguish visual forms early in life.
Why is infant looking behavior important in perception research?
Since Fantz (1961), it has been the most powerful method for studying visual perception.
What are the main techniques used in looking time research?
Visual preferences (Fantz, 1961), Preferential tracking (Johnson et al., 1991), Visual habituation (Fantz, 1966), Fixed-trial familiarization (Slater, 1983), Violation of expectation paradigm (Baillargeon et al., 1985).
What did Slater, Morison & Rose (1983) find about shape discrimination in newborns?
Newborns can discriminate shapes, but how they do this is unclear. They habituate to a shape and show preference for a novel shape.
What did Cohen & Younger (1983) find about form discrimination?
Infant form discrimination changes within the first months: 1.5-month-olds focus on orientation, 3.5-month-olds focus on configural relationships.
What did Yang et al. (2014) find about light field and surface reflectance perception?
3–4-month-olds detect changes in light field but NOT surface reflectance. 7–8-month-olds detect changes in surface reflectance but NOT light field.
What did Alan Slater (1991, 1990, 1985) find about newborn perception?
Newborns exhibit size and shape constancy within days of birth.
What did Baillargeon, Spelke & Wasserman (1985) find about object permanence?
3.5-month-olds look longer at impossible events, showing early knowledge of object permanence.
What did Spelke (1998) find about object unity?
4-month-olds perceive occluded rods as part of the same object, indicating object unity perception.
What did Piaget (1954) say about object permanence in infants?
Stage III infants (6 months) neglect hidden objects, suggesting that object permanence develops gradually.
What is the Core Knowledge Hypothesis (Spelke, 1992)?
Infants have innate object representations and understand object motion and solidity by 2.5 months.
What did Hood (1998, 2000) find about object permanence in search tasks?
Even 2-year-olds struggle with manual search tasks, sometimes searching in impossible locations.
What does the looking vs. acting debate suggest about infant cognition?
Infants may have visual awareness of object consistency but not true object permanence.
What is the ontogeny of multisensory perception?
It refers to how we develop the ability to use multiple senses together, a major challenge for infants.
What are the challenges of multisensory integration in newborns: Crossmodal Binding Problem?
Different senses have different latencies, spatial formats, and speeds. The brain must coordinate these inputs for unified perception.
What did studies on infant dummy sucking reveal about multisensory coordination?
Infants looked longer at the dummy they were sucking, suggesting early multisensory coordination.
What is the Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000, 2002, 2012)?
Infants are sensitive to amodal properties (e.g., tempo, rhythm, intensity) that are redundant across senses.
What evidence supports the Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis?
Bahrick & Lickliter (2000) – Infants detected rhythm changes better when the pattern was presented both visually and auditorily.
What evidence does not support the Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis?
Slater (1999) found that infants also learn arbitrary correspondences early, challenging the idea that amodal properties are the first to be learned.
What was Molyneux’s Question (Locke, 1690)?
Do we start with completely separate senses that must be linked through experience?
How did Held et al. (2011) answer Molyneux’s Question?
Newly sighted blind individuals struggled to match touch with vision initially, suggesting sensory integration is learned over time.
What did Gori et al. (2021) find about sensory integration in severely visually impaired (SVI) infants?
Normal auditory localization, Enhanced tactile localization, and Stronger audiotactile integration.
How does visual experience impact multisensory perception?
Sighted infants are better at integrating tactile and auditory information. Blind infants rely more on audiotactile integration.
What did Johnson et al. (1991) discover about newborn face perception?
Newborns track faces within 30 minutes of birth, helping them learn about people immediately.
What did Farroni et al. (2002) find about eye contact?
Newborns prefer direct eye contact, helping them attend to social situations and communication.
What did Reid et al. (2017) discover about fetal face perception?
4D ultrasound shows fetuses track face-like stimuli in the womb.
What did Ronga et al. (2025) find about fetal eye movements?
From 26 weeks gestation, fetuses show a preference for face-like configurations.
What technique is used to study newborn speech perception?
Non-nutritive sucking technique – Infants suck more when they perceive something familiar or pleasant.
What did DeCasper & Fifer (1980) discover about newborns’ voice preferences?
Newborns (3 days old) prefer their mother’s voice over unfamiliar voices.
What did DeCasper & Spence (1986) find about prenatal learning?
Newborns recognize and prefer stories that were read to them before birth.
What did Hepper (1988) find about fetal auditory learning?
Fetuses suck more in response to their mother’s favorite TV show (“fetal soap addiction”).
When do smell and taste develop in utero?
Between 4–8 weeks gestation.
What did Schaal et al. (1998) find about newborn olfactory preferences?
Newborns prefer the smell of maternal amniotic fluid and milk.
What did Marlier & Schaal (1997, 1998) suggest about early olfactory learning?
Early olfactory learning helps infants identify caregivers.
What is the Transnatal Chemosensory Continuity Hypothesis (Schaal, 2015)?
The uterine environment shapes postnatal sensory preferences.
What did Mennella et al. (2001) find about prenatal flavor exposure?
Newborns prefer flavors they were exposed to in utero.
How did Steiner et al. measure infant taste responses?
By observing mouth expressions to sweet vs. bitter flavors.
What did Schaal et al. (1998) find about prenatal olfactory learning?
Newborns preferred anise only if their mother consumed it during pregnancy.
How did Mennella et al. (2001) show the impact of prenatal flavor exposure?
Infants weaned on carrot-flavored cereal preferred it if their mother drank carrot juice during pregnancy.
What did Ustun et al. (2022) discover about fetal taste responses?
Fetuses display different facial reactions to flavors in utero.
What is the preferential head-turn procedure?
A method to study phoneme discrimination in infants by training them to expect a visual reward when speech sounds change.
At what age can infants distinguish many phonemes?
As young as 1–2 months (Eimas et al., 1971).
What did Werker & Tees (1984) find about phoneme discrimination?
6-month-olds can discriminate phonemes across languages, but 12-month-olds lose this ability unless exposed to the language.
What did Kuhl et al. (2003) find about face-to-face interactions and phoneme retention?
Face-to-face interactions help retain non-native phoneme discrimination, but TV exposure does not.
What did Pascalis et al. (2002) find about face discrimination in infants?
6-month-olds can discriminate both human and monkey faces, but 9-month-olds only discriminate human faces.
What is multisensory perceptual narrowing?
Young infants match monkey calls to faces, but older infants lose this ability.
What did ERP & fMRI studies show about face recognition development?
Face recognition becomes specialized over time, with the SC tracking faces early and the FFA later mediating face preference.
At what age do infants show a preference for faces?
Face tracking is present postnatally, but face preference develops around 2 months.
What are the two brain systems involved in face perception?
- Subcortical face system (SC/Pulvinar; ConSpec). 2. Cortical face system (FFA; ConLearn).
What is the key finding of Lloyd-Fox et al. (2013) regarding motor skills and the social brain?
Greater blood flow in the pSTS/TPJ correlates with fine motor skill development and responses to social gestures.
How does Johnson explain the development of face recognition?
An innate face-orienting mechanism (superior colliculus) interacts with experience, leading to cortical specialization for face recognition.
Besides vision, what other sensory cue is important for early social development?
Olfaction (smell), due to early exposure in utero.
