Week 4: Sensation & Perception Flashcards
What was John Locke’s view on newborns?
Thought they were born with the mind like a white page. All ideas and abilities developed through learning and experiences of the world
Nothing -> things develop
What did William James suggest about newborns?
That babies can’t distinguish between sensations ‘one great blooming, buzzing confusion’
What is today’s view on infants?
They are born with many skills, and actively learn many more rapidly as they explore the world.
What is sensation?
The detection and discrimination of sensory information from sensory organs
What is perception?
Interpretation of those sensations, including recognition and identification
What is the most important sense?
Vision - takes up nearly half of the cerebral cortex (massively over represented in the brain)
Vision in newborn babies?
Infants are born with well developed vision which improves rapidly
Popular vision testing methods?
Preferential looking tasks
Habituation
Conditioned head turn (also used for hearing)
What is a preferential looking task?
Measure looking time between two similar visual stimuli
If they look at one for longer, they have a preference for it
If equal - can’t discriminate or they find both equally interesting
What is habituation?
A gradual decrease in response to/interest in a repeated stimulus
Why is habituation useful?
Means you won’t continuously notice things that are there all of the time
Allows us to be alerted to things that we may need to pay attention to (self-preservation)
What is novelty preference?
Human preference for anything new or different
Habituation experimental design for visual assessment?
Present infant with stimuli: attention/interest
Keep on presenting it: declines
Infant = habituated
Present a different stimuli - if attention increases, assume they can distinguish between the two
Visual acuity at birth?
Infants can see (20-25cm), but lack visual acuity
When is an infants visual acuity comparable to adults?
About 6 months
How do we test visual acuity in infants?
Preferential looking: narrow stripes over plain field
Change the width of stripes, infants prefer the stripes as they are more interesting. When they don’t have a preference it means they don’t perceive the stripes anymore and it looks more like a plain field to them.
Colour vision in infants?
Initially very limited - begins to develop as cones mature.
By 2-3m start to perceive adult like colour categories
By 4-5m have colour preferences
Pattern vision?
As infants get older, they prefer complex patterns
Infants look longer at a patterned surface more than a plain surface.
What do edges and contrasts provide?
Information on object boundaries
Depth and how to grasp objects
Greater neural activation - developing neural pathways of pattern recognition
Children prefer looking at faces over pattered displays. Explain.
May be genetically preprogrammed to prefer faces (eg. Attached to adults who will look after you)
They are 3D, move and have areas of high and low contrast
How does social learning affect face preference?
Infants prefer faces of those the same sex as their caregiver
Have a preference for faces matching those of their own race - more familiar
By 3 months, infants prefer sailing faces over non-smiling