Developmental Psychology Quiz on Face Recognition

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.

Social Referencing

• 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).

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.