Week 1 - Critical Periods and Visual Development Flashcards
Empiricism
- General learning system present from birth
- Experience shapes our skills and knowledge
Nativism
- Different sets of learning systems that are designed to acquire certain types of information
- Certain aspects of mental life are a core part of being human and they are present from the beginning
Continuous Development
- Continuity
- Quantitative Change
- Development is incremental and gradual
Discontinuous Development
- Discontinuity
- Qualitative Change
- A new structure or process emerges that was not there
before
Samples in Development
- White
- Educated
- Industrialized
- Rich
- Democratic
Acuity
- Sharpness of clarity of vision
- Ability to see contrasts that represent lines, shapes, and shadows
- 20/20 vision
Preferential Looking
- Present two stimuli
- Does the infant show preference in either one of the stimuli?
Challenges of Preferential Looking
- Two stimuli can’t differ in any way other than the width of the stripes
- Colour
- Luminance
How to test acuity?
- Preferential Looking
- Habituation
- Optokinetic Nystagmus
- Visual Evoked Potentials
Face Perception in Babies
- Babies like looking at faces, even in the womb
- As they develop, they become expert face processors
Face Perception in Adults
Can:
- Recognize 1000s of faces
- Recognize faces when hairstyles have changed
- Recognize faces when someone takes their glasses off or put their glasses on
- Recognize faces after someone has aged many years
When does face perception become adult like?
- Adult-like skill at face recognition does not occur until sometime during adolescence
- In tasks in which participants are asked to learn new faces and then recognize them, 14-year-olds make more mistakes than do adults
Featural processing
Processing the shape of individual features
Configural processing
Processing the distance between two features
Which type of facial processing is adult like first?
Featural processing (adult-like by age of 10)
When does acuity become adult-like?
At around 3 years old (36 months)
Habituation
__
Optokinetic Nystagmus
__
Visual Evoked Potential
__
Critical Periods in Development
- Period during which input/experience is necessary to achieve typical outcomes
- Lack of input after that period will not have detrimental effects
Critical Period in Visual Development (Cataract experiment)
- Babies born with cataracts (One or both eyes) –> Deprived of patterned visual input until the cataract is corrected
- Compared infants born with cataracts in one or both eyes to age-matched controls
- Tested acuity of babies with cataracts right
after corrective lenses were inserted - Follow ups at 1 hour, 1 week, 1 month
Conclusion of baby cataract experiment
- Children who are deprived of patterned visual input between about 10 days and 10 years of age experience permanent deficits in acuity
- Children who are born with vision, but have it compromised before the age of 10- years, will have poorer acuity when their vision is corrected
Visual Development Experiment (Patients born with bilateral cataracts)
- Compared 14 patients born with bilateral
cataracts (mean age = 14 years) to age-matched controls and to typically developing adults - Created sets of faces that differed in either spacing or features, and the task of participants was to same “same or different”
Results of Patients born with bilateral cataract experiment
- considerable difference in configural processing compared to the control
- Conclusion: Visual experience in infancy is necessary for typical development of face processing
