Seligman rozdział 6

Sensation, Perception, and Attention

• As a child, Elizabeth M. was considered clumsy and slow and had vision issues that caused her to struggle in school, but overcame this with glasses.
• Later in life, Elizabeth developed a degenerative eye disease that caused her to lose night vision, peripheral vision, and eventually all sight.
• Questions arise about how life would change with vision loss, the impact on perception, and whether other senses become more precise to compensate.

Sensory Information

• This section explores how senses provide information for understanding the world, how infants process overwhelming sensations, and how children discover the meaning of sensory input.
• It also examines changes in sensation and perception during childhood and adolescence

Sensation vs. Perception

• Psychologists distinguish between sensation (detecting sensory information) and perception (interpreting sensory information).
• Infants perceive their environment through senses but perception involves the interpretation of sensory stimuli, enabling recognition and understanding.
• The senses actively help shape the brain, it is not a passive process.
• Sensory experiences are central to human functioning and enable interactions with the world, and even everyday tasks rely on sensory perception.
• Sensory-perceptual systems are often taken for granted until a "glitch" arises, like vision or smell loss.
• Senses and perception have long been central to debates about how we acquire knowledge, engaging philosophers and scientists.

Nature vs. Nurture

• Constructivists believe perceptions are constructed through learning and interaction with the environment and we are born with sensory functions and learn through experience.
• Nativists argue perception is guided by innate abilities and maturation programs and infants are equipped with basic sensory abilities refined by a built-in plan.
• The brain automatically creates meaning from various images when moving, such as interpreting small images as distant objects.
• Perception happens directly, without needing interpretation based on previous experiences.

Infant Perception

• Sensory abilities are more advanced than previously thought and senses function before birth
• Infants are more perceptive than initially believed, with senses functioning prenatally and exhibiting signs of perceiving the world coherently.
• Research revealed more refined capabilities through innovative testing methods such as habituation, preference paradigms, evoked potentials, and instrumental conditioning

Habituation

• Habituation involves decreased interest in a repeated stimulus, demonstrating learning through boredom - Researchers can see that a baby recognizes a certain shape.
• If an infant regains interest upon presentation of a new stimulus, it indicates discrimination between the two stimuli.
• Researchers can test sensory skills, such as sight, sound, smell or touch, with Habituation

Visual Preference

• Presenting two stimuli simultaneously and measuring the duration of attention to each one is an alternative research method.
• Preference for one stimulus suggests discrimination, but equal attention could mean indistinguishability - researchers can know whether a baby recognizes similar shapes.

Evoked Potentials

• Psychologists measure brain responses to stimulation using electrodes on the scalp.
• Infants sit comfortably and view/listen to stimuli while electrodes and computers record brain activity to assess perception.

Instrumental Conditioning

• People tend to repeat actions with pleasant outcomes, showing learning via instrumental conditioning.
• By conditioning infants to turn their heads when they hear different sounds, their language and auditory understanding can be measured.
• Researchers determine if infants can distinguish speech sounds by having them do tasks, like turn their heads.
• Infant perception studies have limits, where infants may not react because of issues that aren't related to distinguishing stimuli, but the techniques have revealed a lot about what babies can perceive,
• The text will now focus on how perception changes during infancy.

Vision

• Vision is often considered the most essential sense.
• The function of the eye is to receive light and convert it into electrochemical signals and we will first inspect how human vision develops before going to other human senses

Basic Visual Capabilities

• Newborns can detect brightness changes and track slow-moving images but infants have limited vision.
• Visual abilities are less developed than in older children or adults.
• At birth, acuity is 40 times worse than adults but improves in the first months, reaching 20/120 on a standard chart
• Infants' vision is blurry unless objects are close (8 inches) or have sharp contrasts like parents' faces.
• Limited visual accommodation (lens' ability to change shape) makes the world blurry, but infants can reach adult vision from 6-12 months.
• Infants see in color, tested by habituating them to a blue disc, and then they noticed a different shade.
• Starting at birth, visual perception develops by 2-3 months, and they are similar to adults by four months old.
• Infants can detect colored stimuli against a background of the same color but quickly detect better when stimuli are on a background of a different color.

Pattern Perception

• Based on research, infants prefer some patterns longer than others.
• Infants are drawn to patterns with high light-dark contrasts, or outlines, due to sensitivity to sharp boundaries between bright and dark areas.
• Infants prefer colors with high contrast.
• Infants are drawn to dynamic or moving objects which can be tracked if the movement is slow
• Infants better perceive the shapes of dynamic objects.
• Infants respond more to moderately complex designs than to simple or very intricate ones.
• Human faces are special stimuli that draw significant attention.
• Newborns like schematics of faces and track them over other visual cues.
• Infants prefer their mother's face and can recognize that within hours of birth.

Early Visual Preferences

• Below 2 months, babies have visual decisions and are aware of physical properties that get an infant's focus
• Banks and colleagues proposed that newborns prefer to look at what they see well and by using a complex mathematical model, Banks was able to predict how different patterns might be observed.
• Since an infant's eye is small and nerve receptors are immature, newborns tend to identify a chessboard pattern.
• Less ideal vision, in effect, helps to explain why they prefer moderately compared to very significant complexity
• Minimal vision explains why we need to try and find the visual stimuli which helps further development of eye.

What Infants See

• When a baby visually develops fully, a chessboard square is usually perceived so the preference for moderate is understood with their lack of developed seeing function

Infant Shape Recognition

• Discovery of infant pattern recognition prompts a question: Do children perceive shapes and patterns or merely angles & parts?
• Some studies suggest newborns can sense whole shapes and most research implies shape recognition shifts from 2 to 3-months
• At one month old, newborns recognize lines and faces, whereas, at two months, they begin recognizing eyes, nose, ears.
• 1-month-olds focus on outer contours whereas those from two, recognize inner features like the eyes and mouth.
• Older, infants shift focus from locating what starts and ends in one space, and want to see the purpose and intent

Depth Perception

• Spatial recognition supports, by knowing when objects are close and far away with defensive squint reflex develops more 1st month in life .

Size Constancy Definition

• This states that for a child they can use how far or close objects are together.

Research on Size Constancy

• A well-known experiment where children looked at small or big objects in succession was done to test size theory.

Object Perception

• A developmental challenge is to separate objects from the visual field when parts are hidden.
• Infants demonstrate capabilities for organizing visual images and the research suggests that between 3-months and up, infants focus on new patterns, shapes.

Infant Physics

• Children have intuition through an understanding of physics such as objects need to be supported or movement in direction gravity dictates the rules.

Infant Knowledge

• Children have knowledge that they acquire, what they interpret and build by a native perspective

Hearing

• Hearing facilitates interpersonal communication and sound waves vibrate eardrum transferring sound to interior ear and brain

Basic Audio

• Babies can understand hearing through turning toward sound, yet can be sensitive to loud sounds.
• Babies could discern patterns with a heartbeat that grew upon reaction to a live audio

Speech Perception

• Babies react to human audio even in utero and the human brain developed to create language to react toward human speech.
• Infants are responsive and learn various tones.
• Babies understand their mother audibly with differences in tones.
• Men also had a hard time connecting if a father was there.

Chemical Senses Smell and Taste

• Function to discover, detect chemical particles known as senses and taste.
• Gustatory sensations exist mainly tongue as children display preferences.
• Can identify tastes as expressions.

Influences and Reactions

• Depending on what babies have around them will influence flavor preferences, and the food source and amount.
• Babies also have expressions that indicate sour and sweet.

Tactile, Temperature, and Pain

• There are receptors that define touch, hot or cold, stimulation with touch in face that allows infant to reverse direction that it has learned can then habituation in the same way when going through the body system which also progresses during growth from head to toe meaning face and mouth.
• Children will then react but can learn through feeling so that this pain or feeling of it may not last and be more important to overall structure.

Sensory Development

• Understanding sensory information which can then impact development. For babies vision for patterns are important as some are only short term where other experiences cannot be had.

Sensory Integration

• Making use of how to take what our bodies are going through can tell us what might happen between senses.
• Babies look where sound is in way that one makes use of both.
• babies get confused if looking for object only to see the illusion of nothing is there.

Intermodal Perception

• To define and process information over several systems

Perceptual Abilities

• Through early moments that kids use how they live in society shows their knowledge of their surroundings.

Cultural Differences

• Cultural awareness tells one their taste and if that makes them open to be more adaptive depending culture. But there is little evidence to support that this affects base structure.

Middle to Late Childhood Senses - Ages 6-11

• Improvement through better hearing through taste.

Attention abilities

• Through an ability to recognize sounds that lets a child focus on senses and things around them and is only developed during early times, when they are older it’s through what one builds and has. But you take a new one to a face, the child will quickly lose focus.

Attention Systems

• Older children develop greater abilities of sense

Attention improvement

• Around 2 they can plan things with a distraction being there. It makes it easier with more than they look at. They can know for other cases of focus how they can be at different jobs in the future.

Adolescence

Attention

• Teenagers can focus longer than children which helps with different goals.

Hearing

• Adolescents face hearing troubles with music and loud noises which does not help with senses. Therefore, some wear ear plugs or ear muffs.

Chemical Senses

• They are more sensitive to the tastes from adolescence due to them being more expressive

Explore sensation, perception, and attention, including how sensory information shapes understanding. Discusses sensory processing in infants and changes during childhood and adolescence. Differentiates between detecting (sensation) and interpreting (perception) sensory information.