IntroDevPsych_Infancy_CogLecture3_2023 PDF

Physical and Cognitive Development in Infancy  http://www.cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/studentvolunteer Will ask for previous experience working with children (not a necessity) Availability (day-time availability a must) 8 hour per week commitment (might not be th...

Physical and Cognitive Development in Infancy  http://www.cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/studentvolunteer Will ask for previous experience working with children (not a necessity) Availability (day-time availability a must) 8 hour per week commitment (might not be that much) Perception Action Learning Cognition Overview Perception Learning Cognition Sensation and Perception Sensation: Refers to the processing of basic information from the external world by the sensory receptors in the sense organs and brain Perception: The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information about the objects, events, and spatial layout of our surrounding world Studying Preferential-looking technique: Involves showing infants two patterns or two objects at a time to see if the infants have a preference for one over the other Visual Habituation: Involves repeatedly presenting an infant with a given stimulus until the respon Perception declines If the infant’s response mnbvincreases when a novel stimulus is presented, the researcher infers that the baby can discriminate between the old and new stimuli Visual Acuity Young infants prefer to look at patterns of high visual contrast because they have poor contrast sensitivity (the ability to detect differences in light and dark areas) This is because the cones of the eye, which are concentrated in the fovea (the central region of the retina) differ from adults’ in size, shape, and spacing In addition, very young infants have limited colour vision, although by 2-3 months of age their colour vision is similar to that of adults’ Scanning and Tracking Scanning One-month-olds (a) scan the perimeters of shapes Two-month-olds (b) scan both the perimeters and the interiors of shapes Tracking Although infants begin scanning the environment right away, they cannot track even slowly moving objects smoothly until 2 to 3 months of age Faces From birth, infants are drawn to faces because of a general bias toward configurations with more elements in the upper half than in the lower half From paying attention to real faces, the infant comes to recognise and prefer his or her own mother’s face after about only 12 cumulative hours of exposure  Upside down faces < upside down objects (by 4 months) newborns prefer faces to objects Prosopagnosia Fusiform gyrus Newborns Lewis First hour after birth Face vs. inverted face (schematic) Preferred face (7 mins after birth) Preferred mother’s face (3 days) robust recognition of faces - 2 months plus Fantz (1961) Average looking times at 2-3 months Average looking time at 3-6 months Fantz (1961)  Prosopagnosia Patients have deficits in identifying individual faces but normal in detecting faces or non-face objects KD - meningitis at 14 months - by 9 years still face blind, and could not be *taught* to recognise faces lack of plasticity in face processing system?  Face are special Fusiform gyrus (fusiform face area; FFA)  Is the fusiform face area really a face specific area? Face are special Yes prosopagnosia recognition of faces is more sensitive to configural changes than recognition of objects  Is the fusiform face area really a face specific area? Face are special NO faces and objects differ in “level of discrimination” and “level of experience FFA shows high activation for a wide variety of non-faces when these two conditions were controlled (e.g., cars, birds, greebles) We are “face experts” Meet the Greebles Gauthier et al. (1999) Activation of fusiform area (FFA) increased when Greebles were presented as the training procedure When subjects met the criteria of ‘experts’, the activation level differences b/n faces and Greebles was not significant  Species-specific effects Pascalis et al. (2002): 6 vs 9 month- olds; 6 month olds showed an ability to discriminate between monkey faces AND human faces but 9-month-olds did not Also known as ‘perceptual narrowing’ – more on than later when we talk about auditory processing Experience Nelson (1993) - infants are better than adults at discriminating monkey faces *other race* effect (adults more than children) Experience with faces makes our ability to discriminate between them more finely tuned, makes us face experts What happens if experience is denied at the very beginning? Experience LeGrand et al. (2001): examined patients who had been born with a dense central cataract in each eye; cataract removed @ 118 days from birth; now @ 9 years of age The set was created by moving the eyes and the mouth around Participants had to say whether same or different  Group Upright Inverted Adults 80 63 Controls 81 59 Patients 62 55 Experience Evolution Is face sensitivity selected for? Certainly it is adaptive (for safety and survival) Non human primates Appears early in life Subserved by specialized neural tissue FFA activation with Greebles & other objects of expertise seems to count against the evolutionary claim But, FFA could be multi-purpose More Perception Depth Perception At about 6–7 months of age, infants become sensitive to a variety of monocular or pictorial cues, the perceptual cues of depth that can be achieved by one eye alone These include interposition and relative size Depth Perception At about 6–7 months of age, infants become sensitive to a variety of monocular or pictorial cues, the perceptual cues of depth that can be achieved by one eye alone These include interposition and relative size Object Segregation Object Segregation Infants who see the display in figure (a) perceive it as two separate objects, a rod moving behind a block After habituating to the display, they look longer at two rod segments than at a single rod (b), indicating that they find the single rod familiar but the two segments novel If they first see a display with no movement, they look equally long at the two test displays This result reveals the importance of movement for object segregation Pictorial Representations Despite the fact that even newborns can recognize two-dimensional versions of three-dimensional objects, children must come to understand their symbolic nature Before they reach about 19 months of age and have substantial experience with pictures, infants and toddlers attempt to treat pictures as though they were real objects Auditory Perception Although the human auditory system is relatively well developed at birth, hearing does not approach adult levels until age 5 or 6 Newborns turn toward sounds, a phenomenon referred to as auditory localisation Infants are remarkably proficient in perceiving subtle differences in human speech  sense of 4–7 musical months phrasing “Screen out” sounds from 6–8 non-native months languages (‘perceptual narrowing’) Developments recognize familiar words, in Hearing 7–9 natural phrasing months in native language Sensitivity to Taste and Smell Develops before birth Newborns prefer the smell of breast milk and by two weeks of age appear to be able to differentiate the scent of their own mothers from that of other women Touch Perception Infants learn about the environment through active touch Oral exploration dominates for the first few months Around 4 months of age, infants gain greater control over their hand and arm movements, and manual exploration gradually takes precedence over oral exploration  Motor Development: Sequence and Trends Gross-motor development crawling, standing, and walking Fine-motor development reaching and grasping Sequence is fairly uniform, though individual rate of motor progress differs. Cultural Variations in Motor Development Rates and patterns of development affected by: early movement opportunities environmental stimulation –space, objects, equipment climate housing conditions child-rearing practices Child-care opportunities Milestones of Reaching and Grasping Prereaching Reaching with two hands, then one Ulnar grasp adjust grip to object move objects from hand to hand Pincer grasp Milestones of Reaching Locomotion At around 8 months of age, Infants begin walking infants become capable of independently at around 13 self-locomotion for the first to 14 months of age, using time as they begin to crawl a toddling gait Locomotion Toddlers also make scale errors, in that they try to do something with a miniature replica object that is much too small for the action to be completed One little boy is perched on top of a miniature chair, trying to sit in it just like he did with a similar- looking real chair, and the other is attempting in vain to get into a tiny car Visual Cliff locomotion and depth perception...  interdependence of different domains of development Visual 6- to 14-month-old infants perceived and understood the significance of the depth cue of relative size Cliff using heart rate deceleration as the dependent Research measure indicated that infants could perceive the difference in depth but showed no fear of the deep side the experience of moving themselves around in the environment plays a very important role  Social referencing, the use of another’s emotional reaction to interpret an ambiguous situation, appears to be important in Visual infants’ development of wariness of heights Cliff Research Thus, development in one domain clearly influences development in other domains Learning Habituation Perceptual Learning Statistical Learning Observational Learning Search for Order Infants actively search for order and regularity in the world around them Differentiation is the extraction from the constantly changing stimulation in the environment of those elements that are invariant or stable A particularly important part of perceptual learning is the infant’s discovery of affordances, the possibilities for action offered by objects and situations  Statistical Learning Involves picking up information from the environment, forming associations among stimuli that occur in a statistically predictable pattern From quite early on, infants are sensitive to the regularity with which one stimulus follows another Sequence Rules p=1 p = 0.33  Cognition PIAGET PART 1 OBJECT SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE Jean Piaget 1896-1980 “genetic epistemology” - explaining knowledge by looking at its origins Piaget was the father of cognitive development research still a main force in research and in education Asked what ERRORS that children make tell us about their reasoning  Empirical philosopher Reasoning and concepts are the hallmark of intelligent behaviour Children construct an understanding of the world through a process of observation and deduction learning can only occur through interaction A Constructivist Approach Jean Piaget’s theory remains the standard against which all other theories are judged Often labeled constructivist because it depicts children as constructing knowledge for themselves Children are seen as Active Learning many important lessons on their own Intrinsically motivated to learn  The Child as a Scientific Problem Solver Reality is not waiting to Cognitive development be found; children occurs through active construct it from their exploration and testing own mental and of the world physical actions Piaget used Called this clinical justifications that method: experiments backed up his back up with experimental findings justification  what CAUSES development Assimilation: Fit incoming information to existing knowledge structures (furry animal, 4 legs = dog) Accommodation: “Mechanisms” Interaction of knowledge structure in response to new of Development information (not dog = cat) Equilibrations: Interaction between assimilation and accommodation. Form stable equilibrium between internal cognitions and external world. Continuities of development  Piaget believed that nature and nurture interact to yield cognitive development Adaptation: The Nature and tendency to respond to the demands of the Nurture environment to meet one’s goals Organisation: The tendency to integrate particular observations into coherent knowledge  Stages of Development Piaget’s theory is a stage theory par excellence Children’s reasoning in the earlier stages differs qualitatively from their reasoning in later stages Within a stage, children reason similarly on many problems Level of Transitions are abrupt reasoning Stage transitions are universal age  The discontinuous aspects of Piaget’s theory are distinct, hierarchical stages Central properties of Piaget’s stage theory: Qualitative change Discontinuities Broad applicability across topics and contexts Brief transitions Invariant sequence Hypothesised that children progress through four stages of cognitive development, each building on the previous one  Infants know the world through their Sensori- Birth to senses and through their actions. For motor 2 years example, they learn what dogs look like and what petting them feels like. Toddlers and young children acquire the ability to internally represent the Preopera- 2-7 world through language and mental tional years imagery. They also begin to be able to see the world from other people’s perspectives, not just from their own.  sensorimotor substages Sub Age Description Infants begin to modify the reflexes with which they are born to make them more Birth – 1 1 adaptive (e.g., suck differently on month different types of nipples). Primary circular reactions. Try to repeat accidentally produced interesting 1–4 2 actions involving their bodies months Begin to co-ordinate multiple simple actions (e.g., grasp + suck)  sensorimotor substages Sub Age Description Interested in consequences of actions other than on their bodies (e.g., bat ball) 4–8 More efficient co-ordination of actions (e.g., 3 months mobile/leg kicks) Still environmentally driven responses (no abstract goals). OBJECT PERMANENCE. Coordination of secondary reactions: Combine two or more actions into an 8 – 12 4 effective routine (e.g., removing pillow to months expose match box) A-Not-B error Piaget’s A-Not-B Task support Sub Age Description Tertiary circular reactions. Actively search for new way 12 – 18 5 to interact with objects months Deliberately vary their actions Beginnings of representational thought. Uses actions to represent other objects/actions 18 – 24 E.g. opening mouth to represent opening the 6 months matchbox. The first sign of this capacity is deferred imitation, the repetition of other people’s behaviour a substantial time after it occurred. sensorimotor substages Object permanence? violation-of-expectation Infants prefer to look at novel stimuli more than at familiar stimuli 2 displays presented to infants. Real: objects behave in a way that is consistent with physical laws (object permanence/concept principles). Magical: objects behave in a way that is inconsistent with physical laws IF baby understands the physical laws being violated, the Magical display will be more novel (different from the real, everyday world!) than Real display. THUS: should look longer at Magic than Real display search paradigm hide an object. if baby searches for the object s/he must realize it still exists out of sight Object permanence? Anticipating a moving object  There is a development of this ability What over 2 months… between the age of 4 months and the age of 6 months a baby begins to understand that if an object does this disappears on a certain trajectory, it keeps going in that direction… fairly mean? sophisticated physical law! Suggests that 2 months of experience with the world allows for this skill to develop…  Object permanence searching for objects once they have been hidden  Babies show the A-Not-B pattern even if the object is not hidden but just waved around at first one and then another position The A-Not-B On the first trial, when developmental psychologist Linda Error Smith waves one object in the air, the baby will reach for that object On the next trial, after seeing the second object waved, he will reach for the one he picked up before  so, what happened here? summary development is (again) continuous – moving from simple accomplishments and reflexes to more complex understanding both qualitative and quantitative differences across the first few years of life certain things seem to be given special consideration in development (faces? patterns?)