Developmental Psychology I: Infancy and Childhood Perception PDF

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY I: INFANCY AND Perception CHILDHOOD Objectives  By the end of today you should:  be aware of the distinction between sensation and perception and the reasons why we study perception  be able to describe the different theories of perceptio...

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY I: INFANCY AND Perception CHILDHOOD Objectives  By the end of today you should:  be aware of the distinction between sensation and perception and the reasons why we study perception  be able to describe the different theories of perception and also explain concepts such as affordances and invariances  be familiar with developments in each of the five senses  understand and describe the different cues which aid in the development of vision  be able to describe the concept of intermodal perception Question: Sensation how do you define… Perception The study of perception Sensation – the act Perception – the of detecting a process by which particular stimulus we make sense of event via a sensory our sensations system  1. Generalisations about perceptual capabilities based on motor skills 2. Long held assumption that humans are Underestimating born with minimal capacity and gradually perceptual build competence through experience abilities 3. Measures of perceptual skill in older children were extrapolated downward John Flavell (1985) Theories of Perceptual Development Nativist accounts – meaningful perceptual structures exist in the world therefore perception is a process of detecting this information Constructivist accounts – some innate perceptual ability detects perceptual information and constructs meaning from it, based on interaction Piaget’s theory  The process of perception is supplemented by the process of perceptual activity, the former being innate and the latter the intellects correction of initial impressions with reference to previous experience.  Piaget distinguished between perception and perceptual activity  Suggested that perception is dependent on intelligence Gibson’s theory  Perceptual development is an active cognitive process in which we interact selectively with the array of possibilities afforded to us by the environment (E. Gibson, 1969; J. J. Gibson, 1979)  Affordances - the properties of objects that offer the individual the potential to interact with the object in a variety of ways (E. Gibson, 2000, 2003)  Invariances – aspects of the environment which do not change  Schema – a mental representation or knowledge structure which guides our understanding of the environment Studying infant perception  Preferential looking is often used – procedure for testing infant perceptual and cognitive skills by observing infant viewing preferences to two or more items  Gaze - rate, duration and intensity Studying infant perception  Habituation – recovery A procedure for testing infant perceptual and cognitive skills by repeatedly presenting an item until the infant’s interest drops to some criterion or set level, then presenting a novel item to see if the infant shows refreshed interest and so can distinguish it from the Novelty vs boredom familiar one. Discussion  Thinking about preferential looking and habituation – recovery techniques, what are some possible limitations of these tools? Development of the senses Touch Taste Smell Hearing Vision Touch I  Neonatal reflexes  Rooting  Babinski  Temperature - hot vs cold (Reisman, 1987)  Kangaroo contact - linked to development for pre-term and low birth weight babies (Field, 2010, Kida and Shinohara, 2013)  Touch II  Studies have shown infants alter their sucking of different pacifiers and their grasping of objects of different weights and temperatures (Hernandez-Rief et al., 2000; Field, 2010)  Infants can discriminate objects based on touch (Gibson and Walker, 1984 and Streri, Lhote, & Dutilleul, 2000).  Babies given an object to explore by touch alone will handle it more than a familair object (Streri and Spelke, 1988; Catherwood, 1993). This would suggest they are using their sense of touch to collect information. Taste  New-borns prefer sweet tastes (Blass and Ciaramitaro, 1994)  Two-day old infants can discriminate between sweet, sour, bitter and salty (Rosenstein and Oster, 1988)  Infant taste preferences can be modified by early experience (Menella and Beauchamp, 1996) Smell  6 day-old infants could distinguish their mother from other mothers on the basis of smell (MacFarlane, 1975)  Infant smell perception is well developed, and they show preferences to similar things to adults (vanilla, strawberry, banana) and avoidance of ‘unpleasant’ smells (disinfectant, fish, rotten eggs) (Maurer and Mauer, 1988, Steiner, 1979)  Infants will quickly turn their head away from a noxious smell like ammonia (Rieser, Yonas and Wilkner, 1976)  Learning can take place - anise (Schaal, Marlier, & Soussignan, 2000).  Hearing I  Evoked otoacoustic emissions (EOAE), where a small microphone placed in the ear picks up feedback, can be used to test hearing.  Observation of infant response to sound is used (e.g. shaking a rattle to one side of the head)  High-amplitude sucking (HAS) method – a not nutritive (no food) pacifier is linked to equipment that controls sound production. When the infant sucks at a certain rate the sound is played, when they habituate the sucking rate decreases and a new sound is played. If the infant detects a difference in the sound their sucking rate will increase  Hearing II  Auditory sensitivity – infants are less sensitive to volume than adults  The sounds to which infants are most sensitive are those which come within the typical frequency range of a human voice (Aslin, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1998)  New-born infants prefer human speech over non-speech sounds which are structurally similar (Vouloumanos & Werker, 2004).  An infant’s ability to discriminate between sounds is more fine-tuned than an adult’s (Aldridge, Stillman, & Bower, 2001).  Infants are less sensitive to low-pitched sounds but quickly reach adult levels of pitch discrimination, usually by 2 years of age (Saffran & Griepentrog, 2001).  Preferential orientation to speech and music (Kuhl and Rivera-Gaxiola, 2008) suggesting perception of and preference for organised sounds  Research has shown that infants have impressive capabilities locating the source of sounds (e.g., Muir & Clifton, 1985; Muir & Field, 1979, Clifton et al., 1994) The development of vision  Visual acuity  Colour vision  Pattern perception  Object perception  Face perception  Depth perception  Intermodal perception  Visual Acuity  20/20 – can see as well as the average person at 20 ft (6m)  If vision is weaker, number on the right will be larger e.g. 20/600 – seeing at 20 ft (6m) what the average person sees at 600 ft (182m)  New-born vision is about 20/600 (Courage and Adams, 1990)  By 8 months able to see about one fourth as well as an adult (i.e. stripes of about 0.01 of an inch wide from one foot away). Visual acuity reaches adult levels by about 5 years of age (Maurer & Maurer, 1988).  Visual accommodation – changing the shape of the lens to focus on a target (Bremner, 1994) Colour vision  Hue - refers to the wavelength of light, the primary feature which distinguishes one colour from another  Brightness – intensity of the colour can be distinguished by new-borns (Maurer and Maurer, 1988) but it does not appear that they can distinguish hue.  Younger than seven weeks unlikely to be able to process colour information (Kellman and Banks, 1998)  Progression of colour vision:  2 months able to discriminate colour  by 3 months can group colours into basic categories  by 4 months colours perceived in the same way as adults (Teller, 1997)  Pattern perception  Contrast sensitivity - this refers to the characteristic changes in brightness across the different regions of a visual pattern, for example, the differences in the black and white squares of a checkerboard patterns (Banks & Ginsburg, 1985)  New-borns show a preference for pattern over a plain stimuli (Fantz, 1961) and prefer increasingly complex visual patterns (Banks & Salapatek, 1983)  New-borns will initially focus on the edges and boundaries of a pattern, such as a human face (Maurer & Salapatek, 1976)  By 2 months of age, they will begin to take in features which reside inside the pattern (Kellman & Arterberry, 2006; Kellman & Banks, 1998)  By about 3 months of age, infants are almost as able as adults to see a unified pattern in a moving image (Booth, Pinto, & Berthenthal, 2002)  By 9 months infants show a distinct preference for a pattern of lights representing a person in motion as opposed to a pattern of randomly moving lights (Bertenthal, Profitt, & Kramer, 1987).  Object perception  Size constancy - the ability to perceive an object’s size as the same no matter what its distance is from the observer and independent of the size of its retinal image  New-born infants come equipped with this ability (Slater, Mattock, & Brown, 1990) and the skill further develops as an infant’s binocular vision improves. Refinements in the perception of size constancy continue to take place until about 11 years of age (Kellman & Banks, 1998).  Shape constancy - the perception of an object’s shape as being consistent even though movement may change the shape of its image on the retina  This ability is also present at birth (Slater and Morrison, 1985)  Infants also rely on motion and tend to be more focused on moving objects (Bahrick, Gogate, & Ruiz, 2002).  Face perception  Infants show a preference for human face patterns over any other stimuli (Fantz, 1966)  Evidence that after only four hours new- borns show preferential fixation for their mother’s face (Field et al, 1984)  1 month old infants scan the edge of faces - perhaps this is where there is the highest contrast between skin and hair (Maurer and Salapatek, 1976)  At 2 -3 months infants also scan the interior of the face (Cohen & Salapatek, 1975)  Depth perception I  Visual Cliff task – 6 months infants reluctant to cross (Gibson and Walk, 1960)  Joseph Campos – shallow and deep  1.5months – shallow then deep = slow heartrate (Campos, Langer, & Krowitz, 1970). 7 – 9 month olds – deep = accelerated heart rate (Bertenthal & Campos 1987; Campos, Bertenthal, & Kermonian, 1992) Depth perception Depth perception II  Kinetic depth cues - motion of objects through our visual field. This movement provides clues as to how close or distant things are from us by the speed with which they pass through our visual field. By 3 months infants appear to be sensitive to these cues (Yonas and Owsley, 1987)  Retinal disparity - each eye receives slightly different images of a given scene. By about 3 months of age infants are able to use retinal disparity to perceive depth, and this ability improves rapidly over the first year of life (Brown & Miracle, 2003)  Pictorial depth cues - the kinds of information that artists use to convey depth and perspective in two-dimensional art forms such as drawing. By the time they are about 7 months old infants begin to respond to pictorial depth cues (Arterberry, Yonas, & Bensen, 1989; Sen, Yonas, & Knill, 2001) Intermodal perception  The integration of sensory information from more than one modality at a time  Infants can join up information to form a whole view of an object. They will show distress if there is a mismatch e.g. Lip movements and sound (Broerse et al, 1983) and puppets moving to a rhythm (Spelke, 1979)  Ability to integrate tactile and visual information  1-month olds, either given smooth or bumpy pacifier which was then removed. They were then shown an image which contained both pacifiers – babies looked longer at the type they had been given (Meltzoff and Borton, 1979)  13 - 43 hours, all exclusively breastfed, showed visual preference for the pacifier type they had been given for 20 seconds (Kaye and Bower, 1994) Objectives  By the end of today you should:  be aware of the distinction between sensation and perception and the reasons why we study perception  be able to describe the different theories of perception and also explain concepts such as affordances and invariances  be familiar with developments in each of the five senses  understand and describe the different cues which aid in the development of vision  be able to describe the concept of intermodal perception