Infant Perception Development

Question 1

Why is a sensory experience important in infant perception?

Answer 1

Its vital in determining the organisation of the brain.

Question 2

What are the 4 ways we can assess infants perception abilities?

Answer 2

Habituation, preferential looking, evoked potentials and operant conditioning?

Question 3

What is habituation?

Answer 3

The process of learning to be bored with a stimulus, helps to show that infant has discriminated between two stimuli.

Question 4

How do we perceive habituation has occured?

Answer 4

After repeated presentation with same stimulus infant will become bored + look away. If a different stimulus is presented + infant regains interested = discriminated between two stimuli

Question 5

What is preferential looking?

Answer 5

An infant prefers to look at complex scenes rather than dull ones

Question 6

What evidence has been shown for preferential looking?

Answer 6

Measured infants ability to see gratings (black + white pannels) - prefer to look at patch of grating over uniform brightness, if they don’t show this preference its inferred they can’t see the grating

Question 7

What is evoked potentials?

Answer 7

Assessing how infants brain responds to different stimulation by measuring electrical conductivity

Question 8

What is operant conditioning and an example?

Answer 8

Infants can learn to respond to a stimulus if they are reinforced for the response, e.g. sucking faster on mums nipple to get more milk

Question 9

Why is visual sensory experience vital in infant development?

Answer 9

The visual system requires early stimulation to develop normally, healthily + to avoid deficits (e.g. congenital cataracts) that can affect later visual perception

Question 10

How is newborn infants vision conceptualised?

Answer 10

They have vision but lack acuity (detail). Can see about 20-25cm from their face, objects at 6m are as distinct as objects at 180m for adults. This means they just prefer to look at whatever they can see well

Question 11

How is older infants vision conceptualised?

Answer 11

Around 2-3 months a breakthrough occurs in perception of forms, e.g. shapes of people.

Question 12

What is depth perception?

Answer 12

The ability to perceive spatial (change in depth) relations in 3D

Question 13

What did Gibson + Walk (1960) find in their examination of depth perception?

Answer 13

All 38 infants aged 6-14 months moved towards their mums without hesitation at the ‘shallow’ end of the box. When their mums stood at the ‘deep’ end and coaxed them to go over, which required them to cross the illusionary vertical drop almost all refused

Question 14

What did later replications of Gibson + Walk (1960) find?

Answer 14

Infants could perceive the ‘cliffs’ by 2 months and where more curious (i.e. moving towards it) than fearful. Could be confirmed infant perceived it by their carefulness approaching it, e.g. putting toe out first before crawling

Question 15

Why is auditory sensory experience vital in infant development?

Answer 15

Exposure to auditory stimulation early affects architecture of developing brain + later influences auditory perception skills

Question 16

What are 4 basic capacities of hearing at birth?

Answer 16

1) Can hear better than see - turn towards sound more than visual stimuli
2) Can localise sound + be startled by them
3) Prefer complex auditory stimuli
4) Can discriminate among sounds differing in loudness, duration, freq/pitch