Week 1: Early Development

Question 1

What are the core abilities in the first three years of a child’s life?

Answer 1

• Orienting to faces
• Recognising faces
• Imitating actions
• Joint attention – responding
• Joint attention – initiating
• Empathy
• Understanding emotion
• Understanding that other people have thoughts and feelings
• Gateway to social world
• Information about emotions
• Identity – mother and stranger
• Foundations of joint attention
• Information about the world

Question 3

How can we study face processing in infancy?

Answer 3

• Can’t use traditional adult methods of asking questions, button pressing
• Need ways baby can show us what they know
• Neurocognitive methods:
• Visual attention (habituation, visual preference)
• Eyetracking
• EEG

Question 4

How are visual preference studies carried for infants?

Answer 4

What does baby choose to look at?

• Show baby two pictures
• Record looking time to each
• Calculate A/(A+B)
• If significantly different to 50%, indicates a systematic preference
• Important control: randomize side
• Gender, upright, ethnicity

Question 5

What is habituation?

Answer 5

Habituation is one of the simplest and most common forms of learning. It allows people to tune out non-essential stimuli and focus on the things that really demand attention. Habituation is something that happens regularly in your everyday life, yet you are probably largely unaware of it.

Question 6

What are the key characteristics of Habituation?

Answer 6

• Duration
• Frequency
• Intensity
• Change

Question 7

How does duration effect habituation?

Answer 7

If the habituation stimulus is not presented for a long enough period before a sudden reintroduction, the response will once again reappear at full-strength, a phenomenon known as spontaneous recovery. So if that noisy neighbor’s loud banging (from the example above) were to stop and start, you’re less likely to become habituated to it.

Question 8

How does Frequency effect Habituation?

Answer 8

The more frequently a stimulus is presented, the faster habituation will occur. If you wear that same perfume every day, you’re more likely to stop noticing it earlier each time.

Question 9

How does intensity effect Habituation?

Answer 9

Very intense stimuli tend to result in slower habituation. In some cases, such as deafening noises like a car alarm or a siren, habituation will never occur (a car alarm wouldn’t be very effective as an alert if people stopped noticing it after a few minutes).

Question 10

How does change effect Habituation?

Answer 10

Changing the intensity or duration of the stimulation may result in a reoccurrence of the original response. So if that banging noise grew louder over time, or stopped abruptly, you’d be more likely to notice it again.

Question 11

What is the process of understanding infant habituation?

Answer 11

• Show baby one picture over and over again
• Record looking time to each stimulus presentation
• Terminate the task when a baby meets habituation criterion; habituation time can measure the speed of learning
• Show baby the familiar stimulus paired with a novel one
• Measure preference
• Can administer test after a delay to measure memory

Question 12

How does Eyetracking work in capturing the gaze of an infant?

Answer 12

• Uses infrared light to measure precise eye position on a static or dynamic stimulus?
• Millisecond level resolution (e.g. take samples 300 times/second)
• Many possible measures:
  
  • Average together fixations in a ‘region of interest’ (e.g. eyes, mouths) and average across a video – what facial features do babies use? What do they prefer?
  • Measure the lengths of each fixation (fixation duration)
  • How many areas of interest are visited? (exploration of a scene)
  • Visual reaction times (how quickly do they find the face)

Question 13

How does the use of an EEG record the development of face expertise?

Answer 13

• Net of sensors that records the electrical activity of coordinated groups of neurons.
• Ongoing activity can be separated into frequency bands (e.g. delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma) that might have different meanings.
• Using event-related designs, we can measure whether baby can tell the difference between two pictures by the size or speed of their brain response.

Question 14

What is the process used in event-related designs to see how an infant can tell the difference between two pictures?

Answer 14

• Show picture repeatedly
• Average brain activity that happens every time the picture appears on screen, get a pattern of peaks and troughs called components
• These reflect:
  
  • the activity that happens in the brain every time the baby sees a picture
  • The activity that is time-locked to the start of the stimulus

Question 15

What are the assumptions of the Nativist/Maturational theory of social development?

Answer 15

• Baby born with a set of core knowledge
• Other skills develop when particular regions of the brain mature
• Predicts that the baby will be born with a core set of abilities that set the foundations for future development
• Predicts sudden onset of particular skills
• Example: neonatal imitation

Question 16

What is neonatal immitation?

Answer 16

Neonatal immitation is the tendency for new-born babies to reproduce, imitate or copy behaviours which they observe.

Question 17

Why is neonatal imitation important?

Answer 17

Imitation is important because it provides a fundamental way of learning about the world

Question 18

At what point did Piaget argue that infants developed facial gestures?

Answer 18

Piaget argued that imitation of facial gestures developed around 8 to 12 months

Question 19

What is the assumption of nativist theory?

Answer 19

Nativist theory is that baby is born with the ability to understand the correspondence between their body and another’s body, and the desire/ability to imitate action

Question 20

Who were the researchers who carried out a famous experiment involving neonatal imitation?

Answer 20

Meltzoff and Moore - 1977

Question 21

Who were the participants of Melzoff and Moore’s 1977 study into test 1 of neonatal imitation?

Answer 21

12-21 day old babies (n=6)

Question 22

What were the methods of the Meltzoff and Moore’s study into Neonatal immitation?

Answer 22

Infants shown passive face, then four gestures in random order, each one four times in 15 sec period followed by 20 secs response; allowed to repeat demo

• Lip protrusion
• Mouth opening
• Tongue protrusion
• Sequential finger movement

Question 23

What was compared to understand whether imitation was taking place?

Answer 23

1. Experimenter presents an unreactive “passive face” [lips closed, neutral facial expression] for 90 seconds.
2. The infant is shown 4 gestures, each for 15 seconds, in random order: - Lip protrusion, mouth opening, tongue protrusion, and sequential finger movement
3. 20-sec response period, experimenter presents a passive face.

Question 24

What were the methods of the second experiment by Meltzoff and Moore?

Answer 24

• Gestures were presented when the infants sucked on a pacifier (dummy) so that no behaviours that might correspond to the gestures were displayed
• During the response period the experimenter presented a passive face.
• Only two gestures were used - mouth opening and tongue protrusion - which were counterbalanced
• Response period was 2 minutes 30 seconds each time

Question 25

What were the conclusions of the second experiement by Meltzoff and Moore?

Answer 25

• More TP after TP gesture than baseline or after MO
• More MO after MO gesture than baseline or after TP

Question 26

What did Meltzoff and Moore hypothesise with the results of the second experiment?

Answer 26

• Meltzoff and Moore hypothesized that infants were undergoing an active matching process, and this is an innate capacity.
• Important because babies can’t see their face – so they have to work out that another person’s tongue is the same as their tongue

Question 27

What did the follow-up studies of Meltzoff and Moore (1984) look to achieve?

Answer 27

• Used to build theories that this innate capacity was the basis of other cognitive tools needed to build human cooperation, such as empathy, mind reading, and language (Heyes, 2016, Current Biology)
• Also used to make arguments that ‘mirror neurons’ are innate, rather than emerge through patterns of association.

Question 28

Name a researcher who looked to replicate the findings of Meltzoff and Moore?

Answer 28

Oostenbroek et al., 2017

Question 29

What did Oostenbroek’s study involve?

Answer 29

• 100 babies tested at 1,3,6,9 weeks
• Cross-target procedure (show multiple actions, compare behaviors that match or don’t match)
• Tongue protrusion, mouth opening, happy face, sad face, index finger, grasping, MMM sound, EEE sound, tongue click.

Question 30

What were the findings of Oostenbroek’s study?

Answer 30

Oostenbroek and her team found no evidence that newborn babies can reliably imitate faces, actions or sounds. For example, let’s take the example of tongue protrusions. Averaged across the different testing time points, the babies were no more likely to stick out their tongue when the researcher did so, as compared with the researcher opened her mouth, pulled a happy face or pulled a sad face.

Question 31

What was the findings of Oostenbroek’s study based upon?

Answer 31

• Tongue protrusion was significantly more likely to happen in response to watching tongue protrusion than 7/10 other actions (but not the others)
• Consistent with a meta-analysis (Anisfeld, 1996) and a review (Ray & Heyes, 2011) and studies showing newborns protrude their tongue to other arousing stimuli.
• Infants just stick out their tongues when they are excited

Question 32

What were the 11 problems that Meltzoff found with Oostenbroek’s design? (1 - 3)

Answer 32

1. Too many stimuli – 11 for each baby (11 minutes)
   Fatigue, disengagement, newborn required to rapidly switch from one action to another (vs 4 in the original paper); response carry-over
2. Some of the actions were impossible for newborns to produce (e.g. ee).
3. Stimulus and response periods were too brief (15-30secs stimulus, 1 min response).
   Anisfeld (1991) reviewed the literature and required that stimulus presentation of 60 secs always yielded imitation, whilst 40s or less was successful 1/3 of the time (though 15 secs in original Meltzoff paper); up to 4 minute response period for slow motoric behavior

Question 33

What were the 11 problems that Meltzoff found with Oostenbroek’s design? (4-7)

Answer 33

4. Flawed response criteria

E.g. invalid if infant looked away while producing the action; poor description of scoring criteria; frequency counted not duration; only counted if at midline,

5. Experimenter face in infant visual field while demonstrating hand movements (distractions)
6. Drowsy babies.
7. Sometimes testing was paused to try to wake up the baby – results in different exposure to the experimenter – affects familiarity

Question 34

What were the 11 problems that Meltzoff found with Oostenbroek’s design? (8 - 11)

Answer 34

8. Unclear how the authors dealt with drop-out
9. Some infants didn’t complete the full 60 sec trial because they got bored, so 15 secs was included.
   Could bias the data?
10. five orders of stimulus presentation; TP always next to MO.
11. Neonates on the adult’s lap leading to poor postural control. Threat of imbalance can affect newborn processing