Motor and Perception Development

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Questions and Answers

At what age do infants begin to show the ability to recognize the same face across different viewpoints?

7 months (correct)

5 months

10 months

12 months

What does perceptual narrowing primarily depend on?

Exposure (correct)

Age

Genetic predisposition

Environmental factors

Which of the following concepts describes the recognition of objects from various perspectives?

Movement detection

Size constancy

Figural coherence

Viewpoint invariance (correct)

What type of stimuli are infants more attracted to due to evolutionary factors?

Moving objects Signup and view all the answers

What is auditory threshold?

The minimum loudness for perceiving a sound Signup and view all the answers

What characteristic is prominent in child-directed speech?

Exaggerated intonation Signup and view all the answers

What is the focus of the intersensory redundancy hypothesis?

The advantage of multi-sensory learning Signup and view all the answers

Which term describes the ability to determine the direction of sound based on ear differences?

Sound localization Signup and view all the answers

Which behavior demonstrates the first stage of Piaget's sensorimotor development?

Understanding through reflex actions Signup and view all the answers

At what age does Piaget identify the stage of mental representations?

18 months Signup and view all the answers

What is primarily developed through the use of 'sticky mittens'?

Motor skills and object exploration Signup and view all the answers

What concept refers to the basic element of knowledge that changes through experience?

Schema Signup and view all the answers

What type of learning involves imitating actions that one does not yet fully replicate?

Delayed imitation Signup and view all the answers

In Piaget's theory, what is meant by 'equilibrium'?

The harmony between the child's internal representations and the external reality Signup and view all the answers

What best describes the 'tertiary circular reactions' stage in Piaget's framework?

Systematic exploration through varying actions Signup and view all the answers

What criticism is associated with Piaget's theory of cognitive development?

It fails to account for earlier development of mental representations Signup and view all the answers

What role does the pyramidal system play in motor development?

It facilitates precise and skilled movements of extremities. Signup and view all the answers

At what age do infants typically begin to reach for objects?

4-5 months Signup and view all the answers

Which form of perception is identified at 1 month of age?

Kinetic Signup and view all the answers

Which theory suggests that perception is built on the organization of sensations?

Nativist theory Signup and view all the answers

When do infants first begin to show preferences for face-like stimuli?

At birth Signup and view all the answers

What is the significance of visual acuity in infants by 6 months?

They can see nearly at adult levels. Signup and view all the answers

What does the term 'categorical perception' refer to in color vision?

The categorization of basic colors despite continuous variations. Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following describes binocular disparity?

The differences in images seen by each eye for depth perception. Signup and view all the answers

What is the role of the conditioned stimulus in producing a conditioned response?

It takes on properties of the unconditioned stimulus. Signup and view all the answers

In operant conditioning, which outcome is associated with punishment?

Decreased likelihood of repeating behavior. Signup and view all the answers

What does the specificity principle indicate about parenting and cognition?

Specific experiences lead to specific cognitive outcomes. Signup and view all the answers

Which memory system is characterized as having limitless and permanent storage?

Long-term memory. Signup and view all the answers

What does categorization testing usually assess in infants?

Ability to recognize different categories. Signup and view all the answers

The term 'decontextualization' refers to which aspect of cognitive development?

Ability to represent ideas not physically present. Signup and view all the answers

What is the characteristic of short-term/working memory?

Limited access to information. Signup and view all the answers

Which statement about habituation speed in infants is true?

It improves as children grow older. Signup and view all the answers

Study Notes

Motor Development

Depends on physical maturation and experience.
Pyramidal System controls precise movements of extremities (e.g., walking)
Extrapyramidal System controls posture and coordination.
Muscles develop and adapt to change and growing body.
Reaching develops around 4-5 months.
Locomotion development depends on maturation, perception, and experience in each locomotor mode (e.g., walking, walking with support, crawling).
Motor milestones are variable due to different experiences.
Motor development affects:
- Eye-hand coordination
- Social engagement and parent-child interactions
- Development of memory skills
Learning new skills can disrupt sleep.

Perception Development

Nativist vs. Empiricist Debate:
- Nativist: Innate abilities, natural geometry (Descartes), innate organization of sensations into perceptions (Kant)
- Empiricist: Perceptual abilities are learned through motor experience and feedback (Berkeley, Helmholtz).
Depth Perception:
- Binocular: develops by 2 months.
  - Binocular convergence: Angle between eyes changes for objects at different distances.
  - Binocular disparity: Slightly different images in each eye, stronger for closer objects.
- Static monocular: develops by 5 months.
  - Linear perspective: Parallel lines converging in the distance
  - Familiar size: Using prior knowledge about object size to judge distance.
  - Texture gradient: Details appear smaller with distance.
  - Interposition: Objects closer to the viewer block the view of objects further away.
  - Shading: Light and shadows provide depth cues
- Kinetic: develops by 1 month.
  - Looming/object expansion: Objects appear to grow as they move closer
  - Motion parallax: Objects closer to the viewer appear to move faster.
  - Accretion/delete texture: Texture gradually appears (accretion) or disappears (delete) as an object moves toward or away from the viewer.
Visual Acuity:
- Poor at birth, nearly adult level by 6 months.
- Tested by showing infants pairs of patterns and observing their preference for more complex patterns.
Color Vision:
- By 3 months, infants can perceive brightness and some color pairs (red vs gray)
- Categorical perception of basic colors develops by 4 months.
- Categorical Perception: Ability to categorize stimuli into distinct categories despite continuous variations.
Pattern, Shape, and Form:
- Gestalt: Humans see whole shapes, not just lines.
- Constructivists: Forms are built on perception of elements like lines and angles
- Subjective Contours: Ability to perceive edges that are not physically present.
  - Seen in newborns in moving images and by 7 months in static images.
Face Perception:
- Innate preference for face-like stimuli.
- Johnson experiment:
  - 5 months: infants notice facial features
  - 7 months: infants recognize the same face across different viewpoints
  - 10 months: infants specialize in familiar faces.
Perceptual Narrowing:
- Development pattern of greater to lesser sensitivity.
- Ability to discriminate own species (particularly race and gender) improves with experience.
- Exposure plays a crucial role in perceptual narrowing.
Viewpoint Invariance:
- Ability to recognize an object from different viewpoints.
- Develops by 5 months.
Size Constancy:
- Ability to perceive an object's size as constant despite changes in its distance from the observer.
Shape Constancy:
- Ability to perceive an object's shape as constant despite changes in its orientation or viewpoint.
Movement:
- Movement detection improves over the first two years of life.
- Infants are more drawn to moving stimuli, likely due to evolutionary reasons.
- Key types of motion perception include:
  - Translation: Linear movement.
  - Rotation: Turning movement.
  - Optical Expansion: Object appearing to grow as it moves closer.
  - Shear: Object appearing to slide past the viewer.
Object Perception:
- Motion provides crucial information for stable perception.
- Example: An infant might not see a rod as continuous if it moves sideway because it gives the perception of two rods and a box.
- Figural Coherence: Perceiving groups of elements with shared spatial relations as a unified figure.
- Auditory Perception:
  - Fetus can hear in utero.
  - Frequency: Rate of sound wave vibration, encodes pitch.
  - Amplitude: Intensity of sound waves, encodes volume.
  - Auditory Threshold: Loudness required to perceive a sound.
    - Infants hear low-pitch sounds less well, and higher-pitch sounds better.
  - Auditory Localization: Ability to determine the direction of sound.
    - Present at birth but improves with age.
Speech Perception:
- Child-directed speech (high pitch, exaggerated intonation, sing-song rhythm, abbreviation, repetition)
- Infants prefer human voices.
- Speech Discrimination:
  - Ability to detect differences in sounds.
  - Depends on prosody (rhythm and intonation) and phonemes (basic units of sound).
  - Develops at birth but is highly refined by 3 months.
Specific Language Impairment (SLI):
- Language difficulties in the absence of other neurological disorders.
- Children with SLI often have poorer performance on auditory processing tasks, which can lead to problems further down the road.
Multimodal Perception:
- Perception involving information from different sensory modalities (e.g., sight, sound, touch).
- Unified perception: Perceiving multiple modalities simultaneously.
- Separate perception: Perceiving multiple modalities independently.
- Initially, perception may be amodal (not specific to a single modality), but senses progressively separate with time.
Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis:
- Multimodal information captures attention, facilitates processing, and improves learning and memory.
- Redundancy of information across different modalities.
Perception and Action:
- Closely coupled.
- Actions are used to perceive.
- Sensorimotor behaviors: Actions directed toward the body, objects and then relationships between objects.
- Object manipulation helps infants learn shape, weight, and hardness.
- Reaching provides exploration skills and understanding of interactions with objects.
- Moving room apparatus:
  - Creates optic flow cues (visual world movement as the observer moves).
  - Infants sway or fall due to the discrepancy between visual and vestibular (inner ear) senses.
Self-Produced Experiences:
- Experiences created by the infant's own actions.
- "Sticky Mittens" experiment:
  - Training infants to interact with objects using “sticky mittens”
  - Multimodal information through object exploration training.

Cognitive Development

Cognition refers to mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge and understanding.
Piaget's Stages: Cognitive development is discontinuous, stage-like, and universal.
Alternative View: Cognitive development is continuous and individual.
Face Validity: Associations drawn from observed behavior.
Predictive Validity: Observed behavior predicts future behavior.
Mental Representation:
- Ability to think about things or people.
- Internalization of motor activity (according to Piaget).
- Develops slowly since it may not match external reality, and is only internalized through rehearsal.
Schemes:
- Basic elements of knowledge based on assimilation.
- Assimilation: Integrating new information into existing schemes.
- Accommodation: Altering existing schemes to accommodate new information.
Schema: Symbols that constitute mental life after representational abilities develop.
Adaptation: Altering schemes through experience (including assimilation and accommodation).
Equilibrium: Balance between reality and the child's schemes.
Piaget's Stages of Development: 4 stages, moving from self-focused to world-focused.
- Sensorimotor Stage: Birth to 2 years. - Stage 1: Reflex Schemes (birth to 1 month): Infants understand the world based on motor activity. - Stage 2: Primary Circular Reactions (1 to 4 months): Repeating chance discoveries through coordination of two actions. - Stage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions (4 to 8 months): Repeating movements that accidentally cause events. - Stage 4: Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions (8 to 12 months): Coordinating two or more schemes to achieve a goal. - Stage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions (12 to 18 months): Systematically repeating and varying accidental events. - Stage 6: Mental Representations (18 to 24 months): Developing internal representations of objects and events.
Challenges to Piaget:
- Perceptual and sensory activities contribute to representation.
- Cognitive development is not always uniform.
- Infants may develop mental representations earlier than Piaget initially suggested.
Imitation:
- Form of learning that starts from birth.
- Challenges:
  - Infants may not be able to fully replicate behaviors
  - Infants may initially only imitate actions, not the full sequence.
- Delayed Imitation: Ability to imitate actions after a delay, emerges around 12 months.
Classical Conditioning:
- Unconditioned Stimulus (US): Stimulus naturally elicits a response.
- Unconditioned Response (UR): Natural response to the unconditioned stimulus.
- Conditioned Stimulus (CS): Previously neutral stimulus that does not initially elicit a response.
- Conditioned Response (CR): Learned response to the conditioned stimulus after pairing with the unconditioned stimulus.
- The conditioned stimulus takes on the properties of the unconditioned stimulus to elicit the same response.
Operant Conditioning:
- Actions are rewarded to encourage repetition.
- Actions are punished to discourage repetition.
Limitations on Learning:
- State: An infant's internal state (drowsiness, alertness, emotions) can affect learning.
- Habituation: Decreased attention to a repeated stimulus.
- Novelty Response: Increased attention to a new stimulus.
Individual Variation:
- Biology and experience (e.g., economic status, nutrition, family) contribute to differences in development, including:
  - Habituation speed
  - Short-term reliability (consistency of behavior across similar events)
Habituation Speed Improves with Age:
- Speed of information processing increases.
- Short-term memory capacity develops.
- Neural maturation occurs.
Parenting and Cognition:
- Specificity Principle: Specific experiences lead to specific outcomes.
- Transactional Principle: Reciprocal influence between parents and children.
- Zone of Proximal Development: Tasks a child can do with help versus without help.
- Scaffolding: Providing temporary support to help children complete a task.
- Explicit Teaching: Direct instruction.
- Guiding Attention: Directing a child's focus to relevant information.

Mental Representation

Decontextualization: Shift from pre-representational thinking to representational thinking, reflecting cognitive development and the ability to think or speak about things that are not physically present.
Memory Systems:
- Sensory Register: Temporary store for incoming sensory information.
- Short-Term/Working Memory: Limited access to information.
- Long-Term Memory: Limitless, permanent storage (not fully developed in infancy).
Memory Processes:
- Encoding: Transforming information into a form that can be stored in memory.
- Retrieval: Searching for and retrieving information from memory.
- Recognition: Remembering with the aid of context cues.
- Recall : Remembering without context cues.
Infant Memory:
- Not fully developed until around 3-4 years.
- Limited declarative memory (conscious recollection)
- Infants can show habituation and imitation.
Influences on Infant Memory: Study time, repetition, context, and video deficit (infants learn better from live interactions than from screens).
Categorization
- Prototypes: Typical examples of a category.
- Boundaries: Instances that may be considered marginally within or outside a category.
Categorization Testing:
- Habituation
- Object Examining Task: Infants are given pairs of objects, one from the same category and one from a different category.
- Sequential Touching: Infants are shown objects from the same category in sequence.
Category Organization:
- Superordinate: Broadest level, based on shared perceptual attributes (e.g., animal).
- Basic: Intermediate level, based on shared perceptual properties (e.g., dog).
- Subordinate: Most specific level, based on shared perceptual attributes and properties (e.g., Labrador).

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Description

Explore the intricacies of motor and perception development in early childhood. This quiz covers the roles of the pyramidal and extrapyramidal systems, the debate between nativist and empiricist perspectives, and the impact of motor milestones on development. Test your understanding of how physical maturation and experience shape these crucial aspects of child growth.