Infant Development and Face Discrimination

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Questions and Answers

What is the term used to describe the phenomenon where infants' ability to discriminate between faces becomes more specialized over time?

Visual acuity

Cognitive adaptation

Face expertise

Perceptual narrowing (correct)

What was the finding of LeGrand et al. (2001) regarding patients who had cataracts removed at 118 days from birth?

They had no ability to recognize faces.

They exhibited superior face recognition capabilities.

They performed similarly to adults in recognizing faces.

They were less adept at recognizing faces than control groups. (correct)

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

3 months

9 months

12 months

6 months (correct)

Which group demonstrated the best ability to discriminate faces in the upright orientation in the study by LeGrand et al. (2001)?

Adults Signup and view all the answers

What effect describes the phenomenon where adults are found to be better at recognizing faces from their own race than from other races?

Other race effect Signup and view all the answers

What does the concept of object permanence refer to in infant development?

Understanding that objects continue to exist even when hidden. Signup and view all the answers

At what age do babies begin to develop an understanding of the trajectory of moving objects?

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

What does the A-Not-B error demonstrate in infants?

They will select the object they previously chose, even if it was not the one currently visible. Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following is a key aspect of infant development according to the content?

Development progresses from simple to complex understanding. Signup and view all the answers

What role does experience with the world play in the development of object permanence?

Experiential learning facilitates the understanding of physical principles. Signup and view all the answers

What is one feature of prosopagnosia?

Patients have deficits in identifying individual faces. Signup and view all the answers

What happens in the fusiform face area when subjects become experts in recognizing Greebles?

FFA activation becomes equal to that of face recognition. Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following statements is true regarding the sensitivity of face recognition?

Face recognition is more sensitive to configural changes than object recognition. Signup and view all the answers

What does research suggest about expert recognition of faces and objects?

Faces and objects show different levels of discrimination influenced by experience. Signup and view all the answers

At what age do infants show robust recognition of faces?

At 2 months. Signup and view all the answers

How do infants demonstrate their understanding of depth perception?

Through heart rate deceleration Signup and view all the answers

What role does social referencing play in infants' development?

It influences their understanding of what's safe Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following best describes statistical learning in infants?

Forming associations among stimuli based on predictable patterns Signup and view all the answers

What does differentiation refer to in the context of perceptual learning?

Identifying invariant or stable elements in changing stimulation Signup and view all the answers

According to Piaget's theory, how do children achieve cognitive development?

Through active exploration and testing of the world Signup and view all the answers

What is the significance of assimilation in Piaget's theory?

It helps in fitting new information into existing knowledge Signup and view all the answers

What motivates children according to the constructivist approach?

An intrinsic desire to learn on their own Signup and view all the answers

What does Piaget mean by 'equilibrations'?

The interaction between assimilation and accommodation Signup and view all the answers

Which best exemplifies the concept of affordances in perceptual learning?

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

How does interaction with the environment influence development according to the concept of interdependence?

It allows for simultaneous learning across different domains Signup and view all the answers

What is the primary difference between sensation and perception?

Sensation refers to processing basic information, while perception involves organizing and interpreting that information. Signup and view all the answers

How do infants demonstrate their visual preferences according to the preferential-looking technique?

By showing an increased reaction to new stimuli after repeated exposure. Signup and view all the answers

What pattern of scanning do one-month-olds exhibit when looking at shapes?

They scan only the perimeters of shapes. Signup and view all the answers

At what age do infants start to track moving objects smoothly?

By 2 to 3 months. Signup and view all the answers

What factor contributes to newborns' preference for faces over non-facial objects?

They have a general bias toward configurations with more elements in the upper half than in the lower half. Signup and view all the answers

What is true about the color vision of infants by the age of 2-3 months?

It becomes similar to that of adults. Signup and view all the answers

Which brain area is associated with recognizing faces, and may be affected in cases of prosopagnosia?

Fusiform gyrus Signup and view all the answers

What does habituation reveal about an infant’s ability to process stimuli?

It shows that infants can learn to ignore familiar stimuli over time. Signup and view all the answers

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

6–7 months Signup and view all the answers

What is the significance of movement for object segregation in infants?

It allows infants to perceive distinct objects. Signup and view all the answers

What is perceptual narrowing in infants?

The reduction in sensitivity to non-native speech sounds. Signup and view all the answers

What is the first type of exploration that dominates infants' perception in their early months?

Oral exploration Signup and view all the answers

When do infants typically start to exhibit auditory localization?

At birth Signup and view all the answers

What change occurs in infants' exploratory behaviors around 4 months of age?

Greater control over hand and arm movements. Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following preferences do newborns exhibit regarding smell?

They prefer the smell of breast milk. Signup and view all the answers

What aspect of auditory perception is not fully developed until around age 5 or 6?

Overall hearing range Signup and view all the answers

Which visual cue do infants recognize to help segregate objects in a display?

Interposition Signup and view all the answers

At what age do infants start to treat pictures as real objects?

Around 19 months Signup and view all the answers

Study Notes

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.

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Description

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.