Infant Development and Face Discrimination

Physical and Cognitive Development in Infancy

• Infancy encompasses the first few years of life, focusing on how babies and children learn and develop.
• Researchers use various methods, such as ERP, EEG, NIRS, and eye-tracking, to understand infant learning.
• Volunteering opportunities are available at the Babylab, offering hands-on experience in infant research.
• Volunteer positions require a commitment of at least 2 days a week, and some projects may require a DBS check.

Key Processes in Infant Cognitive Development

• Perception: The processing of sensory information from the world. This involves organizing and interpreting sensory information to understand objects, events, and the spatial layout of the surroundings.
• Learning: Includes Habituation(infants reaction to a stimulus decreases over time), Preferential looking(showing infants two stimuli to see if they show preference), and Statistical Learning.
• Cognition: Encompasses higher-level mental processes, such as reasoning and understanding.

Studying Visual Perception

• Preferential-looking technique: Researchers show infants two patterns or objects, and observe if infants show a preference for one over the other.
• Habituation: Repeatedly presenting a stimulus until the infant's response declines. If the infant's response increases when a novel stimulus is presented, it suggests the infant can discriminate between the old and new stimulus.

Visual Acuity

• Young infants prefer high-contrast patterns because they have poor contrast sensitivity. Their ability to detect differences between light and dark areas is relatively limited.
• The cones in the fovea, the central region of the retina, are less developed in young infants compared to adults. This explains the contrast sensitivity.
• Young infants have limited colour vision that improves by 2-3 months of age.

Scanning and Tracking

• One-month-old infants primarily scan the perimeters of shapes.
• Two-month-old infants scan both the perimeters and interiors of shapes.
• Smoothly tracking moving objects develops gradually, becoming more refined between 2-3 months of age.

Faces

• Infants are drawn to faces from birth due to a general bias toward configurations with more elements in the upper half.
• Infants show a preference for their mother's face after only 12 hours of cumulative exposure.
• Infants show a greater preference for upright faces over inverted faces by 4 months.

Newborns

• Newborns have the capacity to distinguish between faces and inverted/schematic faces, demonstrating a preference for faces.
• They also demonstrate a preference for their mother's face after just a few days
• In the first hour after birth it is noticeable that newborns show a preference for their own mother's face.

Fantz (1961)

• Fantz's study, conducted in 1961, used preferential looking to demonstrate that infants gaze at stimuli for longer periods of time, signifying their interest in these stimuli.

Prosopagnosia and Fusiform Gyrus

• Prosopagnosia is a condition characterized by a deficit in recognizing individual faces, despite normal object recognition abilities.
• The fusiform gyrus (FFA) appears to be a brain region involved in facial recognition. The activation of this area increases with exposure to faces as well as expert training in unfamiliar objects.

Experience

• Experience with faces significantly influences face recognition.
• Infants show better discrimination of monkey faces than adults in infant recognition studies with monkey faces.
• Cataract removal experiments show significant improvement with age in recognizing faces, and highlight the importance of experience. Specific experiments with patients with dense cataract at birth show development of pattern recognition in response to specific experience.

Depth Perception

• Infants as young as 1 month respond to optical expansion (an object increasing occlusion of the background).
• Stereopsis, the ability to perceive depth from binocular disparity, emerges around 4 months.
• At around 6-7 months of age, infants become sensitive to monocular/pictorial depth cues, such as interposition and relative size.

Object Segregation

• Infants actively perceive objects as separate from the background, recognizing objects as separate entities.
• Movement is crucial in object segregation, as infants tend to find moving objects more novel than static ones.

Pictorial Representations

• Before 19 months of age, children primarily treat pictures as if they were real objects. They lack the capacity to understand the symbolic nature of pictures.

Auditory Perception

• Newborns turn toward sounds (auditory localisation), indicating sensitivity to auditory stimuli.
• Infants differentiate between native and foreign sounds relatively easily.
• The ability to perceive subtle variations in human speech develops in infancy.

Developments in Hearing

• Infants' sense of musical phrasing emerges in the first few-months of their lives.
• By 6 months of age, they can screen out sounds from non-native languages.
• By 7-9 months, infants can recognize familiar words in native languages.

Sensitivity to Taste and Smell

• Taste and smell develop before birth, influencing infant behaviours.
• Newborns show preference for the smell of breast milk, and can differentiate their mother's scent from the scent of other women within the first few weeks of life.

Touch Perception

• Oral exploration is prevalent in the early months of infancy. This gradually shifts to manual exploration as infants gain more control of their hand and arm movements.

Motor Development

• Gross motor development (crawling, standing, walking) and fine motor development (reaching, grasping) follow a fairly consistent sequence.
• Cultural variations affect the timing and rate of motor development, influenced by environmental factors, housing conditions, childrearing practices, and childcare opportunities.

Milestones of Reaching and Grasping

• Reaching develops gradually, initially with both hands and progressing to using one hand.
• Grasping develops in stages from ulnar grasp to pincer grasp.

Locomotion

• Infants become capable of self-locomotion (crawling) around 8 months of age.
• Independent walking usually occurs between 13-14 months, using a toddling gait.

Visual Cliff

• Infants recognize depth cues like relative size and depth.
• Infants show heart rate deceleration at the visual cliff, indicating an awareness of depth, but not always fear.
• Social referencing, or looking to others' reactions in a situation, influences the development of wariness of heights.

Learning

• Learning, across various domains, is a developmental process in infancy.
• This includes habituation, perceptual learning, statistical learning, and observational learning.

Search for Order

• Infants actively seek regularities and patterns in the environment.
• Differentiation is the process of extracting stable elements from the dynamic environment.
• Affordances are the possibilities for action offered by objects and situations.

Statistical Learning

• Infants' ability to learn from the statistical regularities in the environment allows for early perception of speech patterns.
• Sensitivity develops early in life which enables infants to comprehend the order in which sounds appear and thus predict what comes next.

Sequence Rules

• Infants' capacity to learn sequential rules from early age shows that they are capable of understanding patterns of occurrences and anticipating the next event.

Cognition

• Cognition, in infancy, includes object knowledge and social knowledge, encompassing several areas which are integral to the development of the child's cognitive and social abilities.

Jean Piaget

• Piaget's theory is a constructivist approach where children construct knowledge for themselves.
• Piaget viewed children as active learners, developing knowledge through experiences, observation, and reasoning.
• He argued learning is based on observation and deduction.

Discontinuities

• Piaget proposed theory that development occurs in distinct stages.
• Each stage is characterized by qualitative changes in reasoning and understanding.

Sensorimotor Stage

• Infants gain knowledge through their senses and actions.
• In this stage, infants develop object permanence which is the understanding that an object still exists even when it's out of sight. This capacity progresses over time.

Object Permanence

• Infants demonstrate an understanding of object permanence via experimental tasks such as object-search paradigms and impossible events.
• The A-not-B error demonstrates the limitations in object permanence in the earlier stages of this developmental phase

Summary

• Development is both continuous (from simpler to complex) and has some qualitative differences among children as they develop across various stages.
• Certain aspects of development like understanding of facial expressions may be more strongly emphasized and prioritized than other elements of development.

Explore key concepts in infant development related to face discrimination and object permanence. This quiz covers findings from research studies and the age-specific abilities of infants. Test your knowledge on how infants process faces and recognize objects over time.