Summary
Developmental and Educational Psychology 1 (part 2) AOLB summary
- Course
- Institution
- Book
Summary, used to learn for the 2nd exam of OOP1.
[Show more]
Connected book
Book Title:
Author(s):
- Edition:
- ISBN:
- Edition:
More summaries for
-
Begrippenlijst Development, Learning and Behaviour
-
Samenvatting ontwikkelings- en onderwijspsychologie
-
Samenvatting + Begrippenlijst Development, Learning & Behavior
Seller
Follow
lisahuizinga2001
Content preview
Chapter 5; Perception, action and learningin infancy
A 4 month old child, observes two people who move on their own, as well as variety of glass,
ceramic and metal objects of different sizes and shapes that move only when picked up and
manipulated by the people. Other elements of the scene, like the table, never move. Sounds
come from the lips and objects.
This everyday example illustrates the enormous amount of information that is available for
infants to perceive and learn from. Most infants explore everything and everyone around
them, using every tool at disposal: looking, listening, tasting, smelling and touching. His
explorations will gradually expand as he becomes capable of reaching for objects. A human
will never explore so voraciously or learn so rapidly as in the first few years of his young life.
Perception
Infants come into the world with all their sensory systems functioning and that subsequent
development occurs rapidly. Sensation refers to the processing of the basic information form
the external world by receptors in the sense organs and the brain. Perception is the process
of organizing and interpreting sensory information about the objects, events and spatial
layout of the world around us.
Vision
The vision of newborns improves rapidly in their first months. Despite their immature visual
systems, newborns have some surprisingly sophisticated visual abilities.
Researchers who want to study infant perception must device clever methods that are quite
different from those used with older children, because infants cannot understand or respond
to questions. The first breakthrough was achieved with the preferential-looking technique
(Fantz, 1961). If an infant looks longer at one of the two stimuli, the researcher can infer
that:
a. The baby can discriminate between the stimuli.
b. The infant prefers one over the other.
Newborns look rather at something than at nothing. Modern versions involve the use of
automatic eye trackers. Researchers also use head-mounted infant-eye trackers that show
where infants are looking as they move their eyes freely around the room.
Another method to study sensory and perceptual development is habituation. This
procedure involved repeatedly presenting an infant with a particular stimulus until the infant
habituates, that is, under their response declines. At this point, a novel stimulus is
presented. If the infant dishabituates in response to the novel, the researcher infers that the
baby can discriminate between the old and new stimuli.
Visual acuity and color perception
The preferential-looking method enables researchers to assess visual acuity, to determine
how sharply or clearly infants can see. Infant visual acuity measures take advantage of the
observation that infants who can see the difference between a simple pattern and a solid
grey field refer to look at the pattern. Young infants prefer to look at patterns of high visual
,contrast. This is because young infants have poor contrast sensitivity: they can detect a
pattern only when it is composed of highly contrasting elements.
One reason for infants’ poor contrast sensitivity is the immaturity of their cone cells, the
light sensitive neurons that are highly concentrated in the fovea (central region of the retina)
and are involved in seeing fine detail and color. Newborns’ cones are spaced 4 times farther
apart and they catch only 2% of the light striking the fovea (65% for adults). This is why
babies have only 20/120 vision. By 8 months of age, infants’ acuity approaches that of
adults.
For the first month, newborns do not see differences between white and color. By 2 months
of age, infants’ color vision is similar to that of adults. They prefer colors that are unique
hues, like blue, over colors that combine hues, like green.
To what extent is color perception affected by language? To answer the question,
researchers used fNIRS to determine whether 5-month-old infants categorize colors the
same way adults do. Infants’ brains responded to a change from a color in one category to a
new color in a different category, but not to a new color in the same category. This suggests
that infants brains represent at least some color categories prior to learning the labels for
colors.
Visual scanning
Newborns have trouble tracking moving stimuli because their eye
movements are jerky. After 4 months, infants are able to track slow
moving objects. To do so, infants must develop the use of smooth
pursuit eye movements, in which the viewer’s gaze shifts at the same
speed and angle as a moving object, thereby keeping it in view. This
developmental achievement appears to be less a function of visual
experience than of maturation: preterm infants, develop smooth
visual tracking later than full-term infants do.
When 1-month-olds look at a line drawing of a face, they tend to
fixate on the perimeter. By 2 months of age, infants scan much more
broadly.
At 4 months of age, infants primarily fixate on the eyes of the talking face. However, after
infants begin babbling, they fixate on the speaker’s mouth, supporting the view that
attention to a talking mouth may be related to infants’ development of spoken language.
Bilingual infants show this shift in visual scanning earlier than monolingual infants, which
suggests that infants acquiring multiple languages take advantage of the information
provided in the mouth earlies than do infants acquiring just one language.
Object perception
When a person approaches or moves away from us, our retinal image of the person changes
in size and shape, but we do not have the impression that the person changes in size and
shape. We perceive a constant shape and size, known as perceptual constancy.
Study --> Newborns were repeatedly shown either a large or a small cube at varying
distances. While the cube’s actual size remained the same, the size of the retinal image
projected by the cube changed from one trail to the next. The question was whether the
,newborns would perceive these events as multiple presentations of the same object or as
objects of different sizes. The researchers subsequently presented the newborns with the
original cube and a second one that was identical except twice as large. The second cube
was located twice as far away, so it produced the same-size retinal image as the original. The
result revealed that the newborns perceived the multiple presentations of the original cube
as a single object of a constant size, even though the retinal size varied.
Another perceptual ability is object segregation, the perception
of the boundaries between objects.
The importance of motion as a cue indicating the boundaries
between objects was initially demonstrated in a classic
experiment by Kellman and Spelke (1983) --> First, 4-month-
olds were presented with the display (see picture). This display
could be seen as either two pieces of a rod moving on each end of a block or as a single rod
moving behind the block. Adults perceive displays of this type as a single rod. After
habituating to the display, the infants were shown the two test displays (see picture b). If the
infants assumed that there was a single rod moving, they should look longer at the broken
rod because that display wound be relatively novel. That is what the babies did.
The answer to this is common movement, the fact that the two segments always moved
together in the same direction and the same speed. In the absence of common movement,
the display was ambiguous (both answers of picture b are possible).
Newborn infants do not make use of common motion as a cue to object identity. This ability
emerges around 2 months of age. Older infants use additional sources of information for
object segregation. Experience with specific objects has been shown to help infants
understand their physical properties. Younger infants (4,5 months) who have been
previously familiarized with the objects also exhibit the adultlike interpretation of these
displays.
The culture within which infants develop also influences their attention to the visual world.
For example, White Western attend to the mouth, East Asian attend to the eyes. Cultural
differences are also found in scene perception. Western tend to fixate to the focal objects in
a scene, where East Asian tend to fixate on the actions and background contexts of the
scene.
Box 5.1 A closer look; Infants’ face perception
From birth infants are drawn to face-like shapes. They are attracted by configurations with
more elements in the upper half than in the lower half. Newborns quickly learn to recognize
and prefer their own caregivers’ faces. After the first few days, infants look longer at the face
of the mother than at the face of another woman. Over the months, infants develop a
preference for faces depicting the gender of the caregiver they see most often.
This heavy focus on the faces decreases with age, dropping to about 5 minutes of every hour
by the end of the first year. At that point, infants are focused on hands and objects.
Face perception is shaped via experience by a process known as perceptual narrowing:
infants become face specialists, better at discriminating amongst the kinds of faces that are
frequently experienced in their environments.
, While 6-month-olds are still generalists (looking at human or money faces), 9-month-olds
have become specialists, no longer readily perceiving the dimensions that matter for
discriminating between monkey faces.
Another source is other-race effect (ORE), a well-established finding, in which individuals find
it easier to distinguish between faces of individuals from their own racial group than
between faces from other racial groups. 3-month-old White, African and Chinese infants
prefer own-race faces. By 9 months, infants have more difficulty discriminating between
other-race faces than between own-race faces. This effect is driven by the faces of
individuals that the infant sees regularly. The facial scanning abilities of biracial infants (two
race parents/ at home) are more mature than those of monoracial infants. Infants also
prefer to look at faces judged by adults to be attractive.
Face perception may provide important hints about atypical development. People with
autism (ASD) show different patterns of visual attention to faces than do neurotypical
individuals. Researchers have proposed that infant preferences for non-faces may provide an
indication for ASD.
Object knowledge
Piaget based his theory on part on his tests of object permanence, which led him to infer
that when an infant fails to search for an object that has disappeared from sight, it is
because the object has also disappeared from the infants’ mind. But some clever studies
show this is not true. Studies have used the violation-of-expectancy procedure to study
infants’ object knowledge. If infants observe an event that is inconsistent with what they
know about the world, they will be surprised/ interested. An unexpected event should evoke
a greater response than an unsurprising event. Researchers have raised concerns about the
interpretation of studies using violation-of-expectation procedures, on the grounds that they
require a ‘rich’ view of infant knowledge, encompassing conceptual understanding of objects
and the ability to reason about them.
Depth perception
Infants show early sensitivity to a variety of depth and distance cues. One depth perception
cue that infants can exploit is optical expansion, in which the visual image of an object
increases in size as it comes toward us, occluding more of the background. When the image
of an approaching object expands symmetrically, we know that the object is headed right for
us. Infants of 1 month old blink defensively at an expanding image that appears to be an
object heading towards them.
Binocular disparity --> the eyes never send exactly the same signal to the brain, because of
the distance between our eyes. The retinal image of an object is never the same in both
eyes.
In the process stereopsis, the visual cortex computes the degree of disparity between the
eyes’ differing neural signals and produces the perception of depth. This form of depth
perception emerges at 4 months and is generally complete within a few weeks.
The human analogue is a form of visual disruption known as strabismus, a disorder in which
the two eyes do not line up in the same direction. Children who are not treated before the
age of 3, are at risk for pervasive lifelong challenges in binocular vision.
The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:
Guaranteed quality through customer reviews
Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.
Quick and easy check-out
You can quickly pay through credit card or Stuvia-credit for the summaries. There is no membership needed.
Focus on what matters
Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!
Frequently asked questions
What do I get when I buy this document?
You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.
Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?
Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.
Who am I buying these notes from?
Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller lisahuizinga2001. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.
Will I be stuck with a subscription?
No, you only buy these notes for $6.78. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.
Can Stuvia be trusted?
4.6 stars on Google & Trustpilot (+1000 reviews)
78677 documents were sold in the last 30 days
Founded in 2010, the go-to place to buy study notes for 14 years now