Chapter 5 -- Perceptual and Motor Development

Question 1

When do infants acquire their sensory modalities?

Answer 1

By 2 months

Question 2

How is information from across these sensory modalities integrated?

Answer 2

Detecting matching sensory information.

Question 3

Do age and experience play important roles in development of perceptual abilities? How so?

Answer 3

Yes. Before birth, touch, taste, smell, and hearing begin functioning, but these improve and develop after birth.

Question 4

How do researchers
devise reliable methods to report babies’ perceptual experiences?

Answer 4

Psychophysiological changes in relation to some stimulus
- EEG

Behavioural changes in relation to some stimulus

Question 5

What is the Habituation Paradigm?

Answer 5

(1) After repeated exposure to a stimulus, babies will habituate to that stimulus

(2) Babies generally prefer to attend toward a novel stimulus

Knowing this,

• Present a stimulus until the baby shows very little response and then add a new stimulus
• If the baby shows more attention toward the new stimulus then the baby can perceive the difference between the two stimuli

Question 6

What happens to the amount of time infants spend looking at a stimulus as it continues to be shown to them?

Answer 6

Time spent looking decreases with more repetitions

Question 7

What abilities do infants need to have in order to show looking time habituation?

Answer 7

• Ability to perceive surroundings
• Control over where eyes are aimed
• Functioning memory to be able to recognize repeated objects.

Question 8

In the looking time habituation paradigm, how do we know when the infant can distinguish an old stimulus from a new one?

Answer 8

The babies look at the new objects longer, showing dishabituation.

Question 9

What do neonates exhibit that tell us they can smell and taste?

Answer 9

• They have a Control face when given distilled water.
• Experimenters measure changes in facial expression given a: Sweet-response, Sour-response, Bitter-response

Question 10

What is the rooting reflex?

Answer 10

If you touch an infant on the side of their cheek they’ll turn towards your finger to start sucking on it.

Question 11

When are infants soothed?

Answer 11

if held when experiencing a painful stimulus, and especially so when given something sweet.

Question 12

What is the Visual Acuity of newborns?

Answer 12

Newborns and 1 month olds see at 1 meter what an adult sees at 60-120 meters. Acuity improves rapidly from one month to one year.

Question 13

Where is colour vision and when does an infant’s become like adults?

Answer 13

Cones in the middle of the fovea, a section of the retina of the eye, detect colour (RBG CELLS)

By 3 or 4 months, infants’ colour perception is like adults

Question 14

When does fetal hearing develop? What did an experiment show?

Answer 14

Week 34

Mothers in their 34th week participated in an fmri study looking at brain activity in response to different auditory stimuli.

3 conditions
- Mother’s voice
- Unfamiliar female’s voice
- Random tone

They looked at the left superior temporal lobe where language perception and production is localized. The fetus’s brain reacted more to the mother’s voice versus the random woman’s, but towards voices more than tones.

Question 15

What is the Auditory threshold of newborns?

Answer 15

Infants hear well, though not quite as accurately and have a higher threshold compared to adults

Question 16

What is infant hearing
attuned to?

Answer 16

• Sound pitches in the range of human speech (expected learning example)
• Music (especially lullabies)

Question 17

What is Intersensory Redundancy Theory?

Illustrate it with the example of a Mother clapping in rhythm with music.

Answer 17

Perception is best for infants when they receive redundant information through multiple senses.

Example: Mother clapping in rhythm with music
- Infants pay attention to the most relevant information that changes together
- Sound of music and hand clapping changes with visual experience of mother’s hands moving
- Ignore information that doesn’t change (mother’s nail polish colour)

Question 18

What did a study testing the Intersensory Redundancy
Theory find?

Answer 18

Infants habituate to a video of a woman
talking to them and sounding either happy,
sad, or angry.

Then the experimenters change the emotional content of the stimulus and provide either bimodal or unimodal information.

After habituating immediately the infants responded with a longer looking time for stimuli changing bimodally. They can barely tell the difference from a unimodal change.

KEY FINDING: We start out binding sensory info.

Question 19

How can Infants perceive many of the relations between sensory systems (visuoauditory)

Answer 19

They can:

• recognize visually an object that they have only
  touched previously
• detect relations between
  visual and auditory information
• link body movement to
  musical rhythm

Question 20

How did an experiment illustrate how newborns are attuned to faces?

Answer 20

In an experiment where dots were placed on the mother’s abdomen, fetuses in the third trimester prefer to turn their heads towards configurations of dots arranged in a face-like way.

Question 21

How does the manner in which infants investigate faces become increasingly sophisticated with age?

Answer 21

Eye-tracking devices show that 1-month olds investigate faces lightly, not really focussing on the face but contours.

3-month olds pay more attention to features and relationships between them.

Question 22

Does early visual deprivation affect later perception? Support answer with experimental results.

Answer 22

A study was done on children ages 9 to 14 years who born with cataracts removed during infancy to investigate what can they distinguish:

SET A: Faces with the same features but different configurations

SET B: Faces with different features in a similar configuration.

FINDING: They can distinguish for Set B only, therefore early experiences is key for perceiving faces holistically

Question 23

What is attention?

Answer 23

the process by which we select information that will be processed further.
Interfering thoughts and behaviours that direct attention to other things need to be inhibited
so that we can gain more valuable information

Question 24

What is an orienting response?

Answer 24

attending preferentially to a new, unfamiliar stimulus or a salient stimulus (e.g., loud noise)

Question 25

How is early-life attention capacity associated with later outcomes?

Answer 25

- Infants who habituate rapidly score higher on measures of intelligence as children - Children who are better at paying attention are less easily distracted.

Question 26

How can we help children be more attentive?

Answer 26

* Reminding them to be attentive * Removing distractions * Practice through imaginary play (e.g., be a character and avoid acting “out of character”)

Question 27

What is ADHD and its subtypes?

Answer 27

Neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity - Inattentive subtype - Hyperactive subtype - Combined subtype

Question 28

What treatments are effective for ADHD

Answer 28

Cognitive behavioural and pharmacological treatments are effective. (EX: stimulant drugs such as Ritalin)

Question 29

How do the brains of children and adolescents wth ADHD differ with respect to: 1) Brain structure 2) Neural network functioning 3) Neurotransmitters responsible for communication

Answer 29

BRAIN STRUCTURE: Cortex develops slowly in frontal + temporal areas important for memory and behaviour. Tend to be smaller. NETWORK: Activity of networks for processing information are impaired and disrupted NEUROTRANSMITTERS: Disruption in the release of dopamine and noradrenaline responsible for sending messages, thus some are not switched on enough or too much.

Question 30

What is Dynamic Systems Theory? What are the skills?

Answer 30

Motor development involves the continuous interaction of many systems and distinct skills over time. Instead of developmental stages. Differentiation and integration of component skills - posture - balance - stepping - perceptual skill.

Question 31

When do infants: - Place their body up - Sit alone - Stand and walk alone

Answer 31

Chest up -- 2M Sit alone -- 6-7M Stand alone - 11M Walk alone - 12M

Question 32

How can caregiver-infant interactions impact Motor Development?

Answer 32

'exercise' from a caregiver is often associated with earlier motor development.

Question 33

What is the development of fine motor skills like in infants?

Answer 33

Successfully reach for objects by about 4 months of age, but movements are not smooth Coordinate actions of different hands at 5-6 months. At 6 months, can feed self with hands, but it’s uncoordinated Grasping requires movements of individual fingers, thus: - use fingers at 4M - use thumb by 7-8M - use a spoon at 12M, but are rigid in how they hold it

Question 34

When is dexterity developped?

Answer 34

By age 6, children can tie their shoes, which requires dexterity and an ability to perform coordinated fine motor actions in a particular sequence

Question 35

What is the visual cliff paradigm?

Answer 35

It was long-thought that as babies begin to crawl, they learn to fear heights and that this fear persists from that point on.