Developmental Psychology Quiz on Face Recognition

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Questions and Answers

At what age did infants show the ability to discriminate between monkey and human faces?

12 months

9 months

6 months (correct)

3 months

What is the term used to describe the phenomenon where an individual's ability to discriminate faces becomes more finely tuned with experience?

Face specialization

Perceptual narrowing (correct)

Facial familiarity

Perceptual enhancement

In Nelson's 1993 study, who was found to be better at discriminating monkey faces?

Infants compared to adults (correct)

Children compared to infants

Both showed equal ability

Adults compared to infants

What was the primary focus of LeGrand et al. (2001) in their research on patients with dense cataracts?

The influence of experience on face discrimination Signup and view all the answers

Which group showed the lowest percentage in recognizing upright faces in the study conducted by LeGrand et al. (2001)?

Patients Signup and view all the answers

At what age does robust recognition of faces typically begin in infants?

2 months Signup and view all the answers

What is a defining characteristic of patients with prosopagnosia?

They cannot identify individual faces. Signup and view all the answers

How does the fusiform face area (FFA) respond to non-face objects?

It shows significant response to a variety of objects when experience is controlled. Signup and view all the answers

What was the conclusion drawn from the Gauthier et al. (1999) study regarding Greebles?

Training with Greebles resulted in an increased activation in the FFA. Signup and view all the answers

What finding suggests that face recognition may have a lack of plasticity in processing?

Patients like KD remain face blind despite attempts to teach face recognition. Signup and view all the answers

What does Piaget's theory emphasize regarding cognitive development?

Children progress through distinct, hierarchical stages. Signup and view all the answers

Which stage of cognitive development is characterized by knowledge acquired through senses and actions?

Sensorimotor Stage Signup and view all the answers

What principle describes the tendency to respond to environmental demands to achieve goals?

Adaptation Signup and view all the answers

In which stage do children begin to see the world from perspectives other than their own?

Preoperational Stage Signup and view all the answers

Which characteristic of Piaget's theory indicates that children transition through stages in a universal and invariant manner?

Invariant sequence Signup and view all the answers

How does Piaget describe the changes in reasoning as children move through different stages?

Reasoning differs qualitatively at each stage. Signup and view all the answers

What is one major critique of Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development?

It underestimates children’s cognitive abilities. Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following is NOT a central property of Piaget's stage theory?

Intermittent growth Signup and view all the answers

At what age do infants become sensitive to monocular cues for depth perception?

6-7 months Signup and view all the answers

What role does movement play in object segregation for infants?

It is crucial for infants to perceive separate objects. Signup and view all the answers

What is 'perceptual narrowing' in auditory perception?

The development of recognizing familiar sounds and narrowing focus on native languages. Signup and view all the answers

What is the primary method of exploration for infants during their first few months?

Oral exploration Signup and view all the answers

What milestone is associated with gross-motor development in infants?

Crawling, standing, and walking Signup and view all the answers

How do infants' preferences in taste and smell develop?

They develop before birth, with preferences emerging shortly after. Signup and view all the answers

What evidence indicates that infants can differentiate between two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects?

Newborns can recognize 2D versions but treat them as real objects until 19 months. Signup and view all the answers

What factors influence the sequence of motor development in infants?

Genetic factors and environmental stimulation Signup and view all the answers

What is a characteristic of the facial fusiform area (FFA) activation in infants when they engage with familiar images?

It shows that the area may serve multiple purposes beyond faces. Signup and view all the answers

When do infants begin to recognize natural phrasing in their native language?

7-9 months Signup and view all the answers

What does the development of object permanence in babies suggest about their understanding of the world?

Babies develop an understanding of sophisticated physical laws. Signup and view all the answers

At what age does a baby begin to understand that an object continues to exist when it disappears along a certain trajectory?

Between 4 months and 6 months. Signup and view all the answers

What does the A-Not-B error demonstrate about a baby's cognitive abilities?

Babies may rely on previous experiences rather than current visual information. Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following best describes the nature of development in infants regarding object permanence?

Development is continuous, involving both qualitative and quantitative changes. Signup and view all the answers

What is a possible reason why certain elements, like faces or patterns, are given special consideration in infant development?

They may offer essential social cues and learning opportunities. Signup and view all the answers

What primary mechanism allows infants to adjust their understanding when faced with new information?

Accommodation Signup and view all the answers

Which learning process implies that infants are sensitive to patterns and regularities in their environment?

Statistical Learning Signup and view all the answers

How does social referencing contribute to infants' understanding of their environment?

By allowing them to interpret others' reactions Signup and view all the answers

What is the term for the process where infants isolate stable elements from their constantly changing environment?

Differentiation Signup and view all the answers

Which statement best describes Jean Piaget's view of children in learning?

Children construct knowledge through active exploration. Signup and view all the answers

What does the concept of 'equilibration' refer to in Piaget’s theory?

Balancing assimilation and accommodation Signup and view all the answers

Which method did Piaget use to validate his findings in cognitive development?

Clinical Method Signup and view all the answers

What does the term 'affordances' describe in the context of perceptual learning?

The possibilities for action provided by objects Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following best illustrates Piaget's notion of 'genetic epistemology'?

Children constructing knowledge through interactions Signup and view all the answers

What is one critical aspect of an infant's depth perception development according to research on visual cues?

Infants can perceive depth but may not exhibit fear in depth situations. Signup and view all the answers

Study Notes

Physical and Cognitive Development in Infancy

Infants learn and develop physically and cognitively during their first few years of life.
Research methods like ERP, EEG, NIRS, and eye-tracking help study infant development.
Volunteers can participate in short or long-term projects at the Babylab to work with researchers and PhD students.
Volunteer work may include helping to test infants, recruiting participants, scheduling, coding data, and literature searches.
Experience working with children is helpful but not required for volunteer positions.
Daytime availability is essential, and an 8-hour per-week commitment is needed, though it may not always be that long.

Key Concepts

Perception: The processing of sensory information from the external world.
Action: The way infants interact with the world, like reaching and grasping.
Learning: The acquisition of new knowledge and skills.
Cognition: The mental processes like thinking and problem-solving. This includes learning and understanding.

Studying Visual Perception

Preferential-looking technique: Showing infants two stimuli to determine if they have a preference for one over the other.
Habituation: Repeating a stimulus until the infant's response decreases, then presenting a new stimulus to see if the response increases. This shows that the baby can discriminate between the stimuli.

Visual Acuity

Young infants prefer high-contrast patterns because they have poor contrast sensitivity, meaning they have difficulty distinguishing light and dark areas.
The cones in the retina, specifically in the fovea (central region), are less developed in size, shape, and spacing than in adults.
Infants have limited color vision, but it improves by 2-3 months of age.

Scanning and Tracking

One-month-old infants scan the perimeters of shapes.
Two-month-olds scan both perimeters and interiors.
Infants start scanning the environment quickly, but they cannot smoothly track moving objects for a few months.

Faces

Infants are drawn to faces from birth.
They preferentially look at faces with more features in the upper half, compared to the lower half.
Infants develop preferences towards the mother's face after recognizing it in a short period of time.

Upside Down Faces

Newborns and young infants prefer to look at upright faces more than upside down faces.
The ability to recognize upside down faces improves and becomes similar to adult ability by 4 months of age.

Newborns

During the first hour after birth, infants show a preference for faces over scrambled faces.
Infants also prefer to look at their mothers' faces within 7 minutes.
Face recognition is robust by two months. Research by Fantz backs this up.

Fantz (1961)

Fantz's research on infant visual preferences showed that infants prefer to look at complex patterns, face-like stimuli, rather than simple patterns.

Prosopagnosia

Prosopagnosia is a developmental condition where a person has difficulty recognizing faces.
This may be associated with defects in the fusiform gyrus.

Face Are Special

The fusiform gyrus (FFA) has specific roles in face recognition.
The FFA's level of activation increases with expertise.

Experience

Experience helps infants distinguish between and recognize faces.
Newborn infants prefer their own mother's scent.
The discrimination ability of infants is better than adults in recognising monkey faces.

Depth Perception

Infants as young as one month respond to optical expansion, recognizing an object getting larger, and that it is approaching.
At about 4 months, stereopsis is emerging, meaning the ability to use binocular vision to perceive depth.
By 6-7 months, infants become sensitive to monocular cues (cues like interposition and relative size enabling depth perception).

Object Segregation

Infants can perceive separate objects from moving objects.
The movement of objects plays a crucial role in separating objects.
Babies see things differently if they see them in a familiar way.

Pictorial Representations

Infants start recognizing two-dimensional pictures around the age of one year.
Newborns can recognise 2-dimensional images of 3-dimensional objects, however, children need experience to understand imagery.

Auditory Perception

Newborn infants turn towards sounds.
Newborns can distinguish subtle differences in native language sounds or other similar sounds.
Auditory abilities develop gradually to match that of adults in later life.

Developments in Hearing

Infants develop a sense of musical phrasing by 4–7 months of age.
They begin to "screen out" sounds not in their native language at 6–8 months of age.
This process of perceptual narrowing is noticeable throughout the first few years of life.

Sensitivity to Taste and Smell

Infants' sensitivity to taste and smell develops before birth.
By two weeks of age, infants can differentiate their mother's scent from other women.
Infants prefer the smell of breast milk.

Touch Perception

Infants explore the environment actively through touch, especially through oral exploration in the first few months.
Manual exploration becomes more relevant around 4 months of age.

Motor Development

Gross-motor development (crawling, standing, walking) and fine-motor development (reaching, grasping) occur in a distinct sequence.
The sequence is fairly consistent, but individual rates vary.

Cultural Variations in Motor Development

Rates and patterns of motor development are influenced by environmental factors, like stimulation opportunities, space, objects, the climate, housing conditions, childcare, and child-rearing practices.

Milestones of Reaching and Grasping

Infants show progress in reaching and grasping through different stages, from prereaching to the pincer grasp.
Infants start with two hands, and eventually learn to use one progressively.

Locomotion

Infants start crawling around 8 months of age and typically walk at 13–14 months old.
Toddlers may develop scale errors (not being realistic about the scale of things they are interacting with).

Visual Cliff

Locomotion and depth perception.
Infants' heart rate decelerated, showing that they understood depth even before they showed any fear of the edge.
Experience of moving around the environment plays a vital role in development.

Infants use others' emotional reactions to interpret uncertain situations and their wariness of heights.

Learning

Habituation: The decrease in response to a repeated stimulus.
Perceptual learning: Learning to recognize and discriminate stimuli—through repetition and experience.
Statistical learning: Learning through the regularity in the environment.
Observational learning: Learning through observing others.

Search for Order

Infants actively search for order and regularity in their world.
Differentiation is the extraction of invariance from changing stimuli to provide stable elements.
Perceptual learning is the discovery of affordances—the possibilities for action offered by objects and situations.

Statistical Learning

Infants learn from the statistical predictability of events, forming associations among stimuli.
Infants learn from the regularity of how one stimuli follows another.

Sequence Rules

Infants' understanding of sequence relies on the statistical patterns in the environment.

Cognition

Piaget's Part 1: Cognitive development.
Object knowledge: Infants develop understanding about the object.
Social knowledge: Infants develop understanding about other people and their interactions.

Jean Piaget

Piaget (1896–1980) was a psychologist who developed the concept of genetic epistemology.
His work focused on cognitive development and the errors children made in their reasoning, which revealed insightful information about their development.

Piaget's Constructivist Approach

Piaget's theory reveals that children are not simply passive learners.
They actively build knowledge and understanding through interactions with the world.
This constructivist approach explains that learning is not simply a process of assimilation but also of accommodation.

The Child as a Scientific Problem Solver

Piaget posited that children actively explore and test the world, constructing their own understanding.
Experiments were a critical part of Piaget's study and process.

Mechanisms of Development

Assimilation: fitting incoming information into existing knowledge structures.
Accommodation: adjusting existing knowledge structures to accommodate new information.
Equilibration: the process of balancing assimilation and accommodation to create a consistent understanding in response to new information.

Nature and Nurture

Piaget believed that nature and nurture interact in the development of cognitive abilities.
Adaptation is the tendency of an organism to constantly respond and adjust to new information/challenges to achieve cognitive development..
Organisation, involves coordinating knowledge into whole ideas.

Stages of Development

Piaget's theory proposes a series of stages of cognitive development, each marked by qualitative shifts in reasoning.
Stage transitions occur abruptly in the lifespan.

Discontinuities

Piaget's stage theory assumes that development involves distinct, hierarchical stages characterized by qualitative changes.
His theory is broad, encompassing different contexts, topics, and transitions.

Sensorimotor Stages

Sensorimotor stage: Infants understand the world through their senses and actions.
Preoperational stage: Toddlers and children develop symbolic thinking and gain mental imagery and a sense of perspective taking.

Sensorimotor Substages

Stages describing infant actions and interactions with the world, including early sensory and motor responses to the world.

Piaget's A-Not-B Task

The A-Not-B task is a test of object permanence and is used to see if infants understand the concept of object permanence.
If a baby searches for an object where it was last hidden (A area) instead of where it was hidden this time (B area), this illustrates that the infant lacks an understanding of object permanence.

Anticipating a Moving Object

Infants show a progression in their ability to anticipate the trajectory of moving objects (physical laws) over the first few months of their lives.

Object Permanence

The ability to understand that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight.

Summary

Development, from basic reflexes to complex knowledge, is largely continuous and qualitative differences are significant.
Children’s understanding of their surroundings and the world changes rapidly in the first few years of life and some developments are noticeably more important for other developments (like facial recognition).

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Description

Test your knowledge on the developmental aspects of face recognition as studied in infants and individuals with prosopagnosia. Explore key studies that reveal age milestones, discrimination abilities, and cognitive theories regarding face processing. This quiz is based on various psychological research findings.