PSYC 302 Quiz 3

families of cones

1. L-cones/long: red 2. M-cones/medium: green 3. S-cones/short: blue

development of physical knowledge

1. at 3 months: surprised if box is suspended in mid-air rather than falling 2. at 5 months: appreciate type of contact involved in support eg. from bottom or side 3. at 6 months: recognize importance of amount of contact 4. after 1st year: take into account shape of object

types of prenatal abilities

1. fully developed abilities: maintenance/loss eg. auditory acuity 2. partially developed abilities: facilitation/maintenance/loss eg. visual acuity 3. undeveloped abilities: induction/no effect eg. walking, crawling

types of infant learning

1. habituation 2. perceptual learning 3. statistical learning 4. associative learning (classical and instrumental/operant conditioning) 5. rational learning 6. imitation

myths about infant vision

1. infants cannot see very well: only for first month of life 2. infants cannot see in colour: infants have poor colour differentiation, but can still see colours

development of intersensory perception

1. matching monkey vocalizations 2. language discrimination with talking face and sound

development of reaching

1. pre-reaching (before 3-4 months) 2. jerky/undercontrolled reaching (4-7 months) 3. controlled reaching (7 months and onward)

types of retinal photoreceptor cells

1. rods 2. cones

ingroup imitation

14 month old infants more faithfully imitate members of their ingroup, experimenter read to ingroup babies story in native language, babies in outgroup read story in foreign language, experimenter then turned on lamp with his head, ingroup babies faithfully imitate experimenter whereas outgroup only imitated goal state

beginnings of theory of mind

15 month old infants assume a person's behaviour will be based on what the person believes to be true, even if the infant knows the belief is false

links between face and speech perception

2 month old infants have adult-like brain activation when presented with faces but also activate areas usually used for language in adults

language discrimination with talking face and sound

4 and 6 month old monolingual infants able to discriminate silent articulations from multiple languages, after 8 months of age, only bilingual infants could discriminate the silent articulations

study of object segregation and motion in infants

4 month old infants showed a display that could be perceived as either two pieces of a road moving on each end of a block of wood or as a single rod moving back and forth behind the block, infant would assume there was a single rod moving behind the block during habituation, so would look longer at broken rod because display was novel, due to common motion

development of perception of musical rhythm

North American music typically has simple structure, Bulgarian music typically has complex structure, North American adults can only identify violations in music with simple structure, but 6 month old infants can discriminate violations in both complex and simple rhythms, ability declines at 12 months of age if not exposed to complex rhythms, same exposure has no effect on adults' abilities

classical conditioning in infants

a citrus scent can be conditioned to elicit head turns through a massage in 30 day old infants

optical expansion

a depth cue in which an object occludes increasingly more of the background, indicating that the object is approaching, present at birth, perception measured by defensive blinking response, delayed developmental pattern of blinks in preterm infants

classical conditioning

a form of learning that consists of associating an initially neutral stimulus with a stimulus that always evokes a particular reflexive response, the unconditioned response is the same as the conditioned response

auditory spatial map

a mental representation of how sounds are organized in physical space, developed through multimodal experiences

preferential-looking technique

a method for studying visual attention in infants that involves showing infants two patterns or objects at a time to see if the infants have a preference for one over the other, will prefer objects that are interesting, stimulating, or familiar

stepping reflex

a neonatal reflex in which an infant lifts first one leg then the other in a coordinated pattern like walking, disappears around 2 months of age, not caused by cortical maturation, determined by changing ratio of leg weight to strength

mirror neuron system

a neural correlate of imitation, a system that activates when someone engages in an action and also when watching someone else engaging in the same action

violation of expectancy procedure

a procedure used to study infant cognition in which infants are shown an event that should evoke surprise or interest if it violates something the infant assumes to be true, especially impossible or inconsistent events, infants as young as 3 and 1/2 months will look longer at impossible event, behaviour is influenced by characteristics of the event

unconditioned response (UCR)

a reflexive response elicited by the unconditioned stimulus

unconditioned stimulus (UCS)

a stimulus that evokes a reflexive response

habituation

a type of non-associative learning, procedure involving repeatedly presenting an infant with a particular stimulus until the infant's response to it habituates or declines, shows they have absorbed all information possible, then presenting a novel stimulus to see if the infant's response increases, can discriminate between stimuli and ignore irrelevant information, rate of habituation correlated with rate of learning and higher intelligence later in life

development of face perception

ability to discriminate between faces not consistently present in infants' early environment declines between 6 and 9 months of age, tested through VPC task, decline can be prevented by familiarizing infants to the face, ability then generalizes

positive reinforcement

adding something to a situation or a reward that reliably follows a behaviour, increases likelihood that the behaviour will be repeated, can teach contingency relation between themselves and the world, extent to which they have impact on the world

matching heard and seen speech

as early as two months, infants can match sound of what they're hearing with appropriate visual display, can detect mismatches between heard and seen speech, even from unfamiliar languages, shows natural biological bias to match seen and heard speech, have expectations of what a sound or speech should look like on the face, will look more at mouth than eyes in incongruent cases, infants generally look at eye region of face

colour preference

at 3 months, infants begin to prefer red/yellow wavelength colours than blue/green colours, 1 month old infants show no preference, but prefer bolder colours eg. red more than pink

ping pong balls and violation of expectancy

babies shown box of ping pong balls with two different colours, one with many and one with only a few, infants looked longer when balls of the colour that were fewer were removed frequently or with a higher probability than normal

mediation of perceptual narrowing

brain experiences exuberant synaptic connections in infancy followed by synaptic pruning to adult levels, synaptic efficacy of environmentally relevant information is increased, perceptual systems may be flexible enough to learn new sensory distinctions after formation of neural circuitry

pre-reaching movements

clumsy swiping movements by young infants toward the general vicinity of objects they see, flailing

lifelong reflexes

coughing, sneezing, blinking, withdrawal from pain

crawling babies and slopes

crawling babies initially will go down any slope even if they are incapable, get better at judging when a slope was too steep with practice, misjudgment reoccurs when infants begin walking, infants have to learn through experience how to integrate perceptual information with new motor behaviours, decisions depend on social information

development of phonemic perception

decline in discrimination of speech sounds not present in one's native language occurs between 6 and 12 months of age, dependent on perceptual exposure to and environmental facilitation of native phonemic contrasts

motor milestones across cultures

degree to which motor skills are encouraged varies from one culture to another, infants exhibit more mature walking behaviour when tested naked than when tested with disposable diaper than when tested with cloth diaper

word segmentation

determining, based on experience, where individual words begin and end, babies use statistical or transitional probabilities to pick up gaps between words by what syllables tend to follow others, adept at picking out statistical patterns, need only 2 minutes of exposure and can be tested immediately, not distracted by previous knowledge of language, unlike adults

current views of motor development

early research suggested infants' motor development is governed by brain maturation, but dynamic-systems approach says motor development results from numerous factors that include developing neural mechanisms, increases in infants' strength, posture control, balance, perceptual skills, motivation is important

familiarization-preference procedure

exposing infants to auditory material of words without defined boundaries, can only determine word boundaries through transitional properties, to see if they have extracted the necessary information so that they will show differential durations of fixation or listening during trials

infant reflexes

grasping, rooting, sucking, swallowing, tonic neck reflex

auditory perception

human auditory system is well-developed at birth, infants can perceive patterns in sounds they hear, auditory acuity is as good as adults, but conduction of sound is inefficient, develops over course of infancy

vision in humans

humans rely more heavily on vision than most species, dominant sense in most situations, relatively good vision compared to other animals, 40-50% of mature cerebral cortex involved in visual processing

faithful imitation

imitation that corresponds to the model both in form and in goal

secular changes in motor development

in 1990s, many parents were worried because infants began crawling late or did not crawl at all, traceable to campaign to get parents to put their babies to sleep on their back, allows them to have better view of environment, but have less opportunity to discover they can crawl, but no developmental different between infants who crawled and those who had not at 18 months

conditioned response (CR)

in classical conditioning, the originally reflexive response that comes to be elicited by the conditioned stimulus

efficiency and speed of infants' processing of information

indicated by speed of infant habituation, duration of looking, degree of novelty preference

other-race effect (ORE)

individuals find it easier to distinguish between faces of individuals from their own racial group than between faces from other groups

why study infant development in perception, action, learning, and cognition?

infancy is period of extremely rapid change, development in domains is intertwined, when majority of research of perceptual and motor development occurs, methods used to investigate infants' development are different from those used to study older children

core knowledge

infant have innate knowledge about a core set of principles that are not the product of learning, including objects, agents, numbers, geometry, social (us vs. them), morals, their knowledge is not limited to what they know and are learning

study of habituation in toy and word association

infant is being taught association between word and toy, initially excited and clearly engaged, but gradually decreases in response, showing habituation and learning

matching monkey vocalizations

infants 4 and 6 months of age able to correctly match vocalization with monkey faces or make a sound-face match, but by 8 to 10 months of age, no match was made

role of analysis in imitation

infants analyze reason for behaviour, can either copy the specific behaviour through which a model achieves a goal or employ different behaviours to achieve the same goal, infants' imitative actions are limited to human acts, will not imitate inanimate objects, infants pay attention to credibility of person, more likely to imitate a reliably behaving model than an unreliable one, more likely to imitate those with whom they are familiar, same social group, attractive

pattern perception

infants are able to perceive subjective contour and coherence among moving elements, prefer movement that mimics biological motion over non-biological motion

face perception

infants are drawn to faces from birth, have general bias towards configurations with more elements in the upper half than lower half, a characteristic of all human faces, quickly recognize and prefer mother's face, will develop preference for faces of gender of the caregiver they see most often, prefer attractive faces

motor development in Kenya

infants are encouraged to move, more motor exploration and development, development is accelerated

infant vs. adult learning

infants are less experienced, have less content knowledge, can increase efficiency of learning, whereas adults use old information to help new learning, infants cannot verbally communicate with others or ask questions, infants allocate attentional resources differently, not as good as splitting attention and changing attention from one stimuli to another

auditory narrowing

infants are more sensitive to musical patterns and to differences in speech than adults, but ability declines by 1 year of age, exposure to sounds allows for continued differentiation, measured by habituation, conditioned head-turn response

music perception

infants are sensitive to music, will prefer infant-directed singing over speech due to suggestion of positive affect, have detailed memories of music, preference for consonant intervals or sounds over dissonant like adults, present at birth, but can make perceptual discriminations in musical rhythm that adults cannot, have not yet developed culture-specific familiarity with musical key structures

social knowledge of intention in humans

infants can develop expectations of what object a human hand will reach for, but not a mechanical hand, development of understanding increased by own experiences

colour vision

infants cannot fully see colour until 2 or 3 months of age due to underdeveloped cones

reaching

infants gain ability to sit independently around 7 months, reaching becomes stable, trajectory of reaches is consistently smooth and straight to the target, helps infants become better at process of 3D object completion, they are aware of how far they can reach, show increasingly clear signs of anticipation, especially by 10 months

effects of Velcro-patched mittens

infants given Velcro-patched mittens and toys that allow them to artificially pick up objects gives them increased interest in objects, become more manually engaged and better thinkers about objects at 15 months, earlier emergence of ability to reach independently, better visual understanding of 3D objects, motor development affects cognitive development

picture perception

infants have adult-like perception of pictures, can recognize people and objects, but will treat pictures of objects as real objects until 19 months of age if exposed to pictured objects, infants without exposure do not develop understanding that pictures are only representations of real objects

perceptual narrowing (perceptual attunement)

infants have broad, universal perceptual abilities at birth, abilities decline in first year of life, infants begin to only pay attention to differences in stimuli relevant for them, due to synaptic pruning

touch

infants initially use mouth to learn about environment through active touch or oral exploration for first few months, later with their hands and fingers from 4 months of age, manual exploration gradually takes precedence, facilitates visual exploration

perceptual learning in intermodal perception

infants must learn what particular sights and sounds go together, eg. faces and voices, arbitrary relations between objects

development of innate visual-auditory intermodal matching

infants naturally babble, producing rudimentary vocalizations that allow them to intermodally match stimuli, senses in infancy are more closely related than in adults, less able to differentiate

infant preference patterns

infants prefer patterns that have some variability over patterns that are very simple or perfectly predictable or very complex or random, "Goldilocks effect" suggests infants allocate attention differently and preferentially attend to patterns that are the most informative

measuring visual acuity in infants

infants prefer to look at patterns rather than solid of plainly coloured objects, but when lines in the pattern are close together, infants are unable to distinguish the lines and will interpret it as a solid colour, we check if infants can detect a pattern, allows us to measure visual acuity, 3 or 4 month old infants can see detail better than 1 month old infants

auditory-visual intermodal perception

infants respond more to images that match the sounds they hear, sensitive to relation between human faces and voices, infants will notice connection between emotional expression in faces and voices and match between faces producing speech and sounds of speech, experience perceptual narrowing with age, lose ability to discriminate between non-native speech sounds and monkey vocalizations and match them to facial movements

familiarization-preference procedure results

infants showed longer listening times for part-words created by joining the final syllable of a word to the first two syllables of another word and nonwords, dishabituation effect not attributed to lack of experience since infants could distinguish combinations of three syllables that were real words

visual paired-comparison (VPC) task

infants shown images of monkey and/or human faces, preference for novelty showed 6 month old infants discriminated between monkey and human faces, whereas 9 month old infants and adults did not, 3 and 6 month old infants exhibit differentiation of faces from other ethnic groups

internal detail

infants tend to scan the perimeter, outer edges, or external details of shapes rather than internal details, 1 month olds are unable to make out individual patterns within shapes, so will pay attention to peripheral cues, 2 month olds will begin to examine internal details

physical knowledge

infants under a year old already know about physical phenomena eg. gravity, develop gradual understanding of what conditions an object can support another

social knowledge of intention in objects

infants will attribute intentions and goals to inanimate entities if the objects seem to behave like humans and the behaviour is related to their own, will interpret abstract displays as having intention and goal-directed action

imitation preferences

infants will choose to imitate certain individuals and objects based on the individuals' and objects' actions, prefer individuals who speak their native language

evidence for object knowledge in infants

infants will reach for objects in the dark or objects they cannot see and will reach differently for an object based on size

perceptual learning

infants' ability to pick up regularities or events in environment and associating them with other regularities or events, association learned over time, overlaps with other forms of learning, involving differentiation and affordances, learning that results from perceptual information, underlies development of some aspects of intermodal perception

motor development in China, Paraguay

infants' movement is restricted for first few months of life, delays motor development or changes trajectory, infants catch up later

reflexes

innate, fixed patterns of actions that occur in response to particular stimulation eg. sucking, swallowing, tonic neck reflex, indicate strength of central nervous system

associative learning

learning that a stimulus co-occurs with another stimulus, includes classical and operant conditioning

observational learning/imitation

learning that occurs through observation of other people's behaviours either in real life or through videos, present in early life, scope expands after 6 months of age, infants will imitate novel and sometimes strange actions performed on objects, will analyze reason for behaviour

instrumental/operant conditioning

learning the relation between one's own behaviour and the consequences that result from it or an elicited response from the behaviour

experience-dependent mechanisms

mechanisms that develop depending on experience eg. specific words, phonological structure

experience-independent mechanisms

mechanisms that develop independent of experience

distribution of speech sounds

most sounds we produce are not perfect articulations of the sound and surround the perfect articulation of the sound, or mode

operant conditioning in neonates

neonates can learn more sucking or higher-amplitude sucking will elicit a positive stimulus

imitation as a reflex

newborns do not always imitate, but will sometimes appear to reflexively imitate others, possible due to mirror neurons, failure to engage in reflexive behaviour or imitation may be due to low visual acuity

ORE in infants

newborns show no preference for faces of their own racial group, 3 month old infants prefer own-race faces, do not have bias for first 6 months of life, 9 month old infants have difficulty discriminating between other-race faces than between own-race faces

study of size constancy in infants

newborns shown a cube with changing retinal image size, then presented with a second cube that was twice as large but located far away so that it looked the same size, would look longer at the new cube, indicating they saw it as different in size, supports nativist view

visual scanning

newborns start scanning environment immediately, attracted to moving stimuli, but in irregular saccades, can only track moving objects smoothly if they are moving slowly at 2 or 3 months of age, musculature of eyes is less developed in infants, preterm infants develop smooth visual tracking later

domain-general theory of perceptual discrimination

perceptual discrimination is tuned to environmentally relevant distinctions between 9 to 12 months of age, more efficient at perceiving and processing salient environmental input, neural discrimination may be occurring, even when behavioural discrimination is not manifested

neural correlates of perceptual narrowing

physiological response or ERPs of native and non-native speech contrasts in 7 month old infants showed discrimination of both contrasts, but at 11 months either discriminated early or late in processing, neural differentiation of ability is maintained, adult-like patterns of neural activity in response to human and monkey faces appear at 12 months of age, infants' response to human faces more specific, but still able to discriminate familiar and unfamiliar monkey faces

statistical learning

picking up the information from the environment and detecting statistically predictable patterns in stimuli, infants are highly sensitive to regularity with which one event follows another, show by habituation and novelty preference

dishabituation

regaining of attention to change in stimulus, tells us infants can tell difference between stimuli, they have not become bored with the stimulus or fatigued

rods

retinal photoreceptor cells that are activated in low light conditions

instrumental conditioning procedure with mobile

ribbon tied around baby's ankle is connected to hanging mobile, baby's leg movements make mobile jiggle, intensity depends on baby's behaviour, found older infants remembered the kicking response longer and with novel mobiles compared to infants younger than 6 months, active child

taste and smell

sensitivity to taste and smell develops before birth, newborns prefer sweet flavours and smell of mother's breast milk, smell is important for recognition of mother

contrast sensitivity

the ability to detect differences in light and dark areas in a visual pattern

object knowledge

the ability to mentally represent and think about the existence and characteristics of objects and events that are currently out of sight

self-locomotion

the ability to move oneself around in the environment, develops around 8 months of age, typically first takes form of crawling, begin walking independently around 11 to 12 months

rational learning

the ability to use prior experiences and data and existing information to predict what will occur in the future

applicable themes in infant development of perception, action, learning, and cognition

the active child, continuity/discontinuity, mechanisms of change, sociocultural context, nature and nurture

scale error

the attempt by a young child to perform an action on a miniature object that is impossible due to the large discrepancy in the relative sizes of the child and the object, due to failure to integrate visual information represented in two different areas of the brain in the service of action, diminishes with age but also occurs in adults

social referencing

the child's use of another person's emotional response to an uncertain situation to decide how to behave

intermodal perception

the combining of information from two or more sensory systems or the ability to match stimuli from different sensory modalities, present early on in infants, manual exploration of objects helps integrate visual and tactile experience, information in one modality can be used to interpret ambiguous information in another modality

binocular disparity

the difference between the retinal image of an object in each eye that results in two slightly different signals being sent to the brain, a closer object has greater disparity

differentiation

the extraction from the constantly changing stimulation in the environment of those elements that are invariant, or stable

common motion

the fact that two segments move together in the same direction and at the same speed, leads infants to perceive disparate elements moving together as parts of a unitary object, a learned feature of visual perception around 2 months of age

cones

the light-sensitive neurons that are highly concentrated in the fovea or the central region of the retina, involved in seeing fine detail and colour, activated by wavelengths of different colours, less dense and smaller in infants, infants process less light and differentiate colours more poorly

conditioned stimulus (CS)

the neutral stimulus that is repeatedly paired with the unconditioned stimulus

object segregation

the perception of boundaries between objects, motion acts as cue

perceptual constancy

the perception of objects as being of constant size, shape, colour, and so on, in spite of physical differences in the retinal image of the object

auditory localization

the perception of the spatial location of a sound source, limited in infants to side-to-side discrimination due to small head size, have not developed auditory spatial map since visual and motor skills emerge later in infancy

monocular depth/pictorial cues

the perceptual cues of depth that can be perceived by one eye alone, eg. relative size, interposition, begins around 6-7 months of age

affordances

the possibilities for action offered by objects and situations, found by figuring out relations between the body and abilities, and objects in the environment

stereopsis

the process by which the visual cortex combines the differing neural signals caused by binocular disparity, resulting in the perception of depth

perception

the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information about objects, events, and spatial layout into coherent understanding

sensation

the processing of basic information from the external world or detection of physical signals in the environment by the sense organs eg. eyes, ears, skin, mouth, nose, and brain

visual acuity

the sharpness of visual discrimination, infants have poor visual acuity, cones are less developed, have 20/120 vision or 1/6th visual acuity of an adult for first month of life, vision approaches that of adults by 8 months of age, attain full adult acuity around 6 years of age

intermodal matching without learning

two groups of counterbalanced infants given teething toys, one with nubs and one without, infants were able to match what they saw on screen to what was in their mouth, looked longer at toy that matched what was in their mouth, overcame visual biases, showing ability to match perceptions in different domains without experience

study of infants' depth perception

using a "visual cliff", or sheet of Plexiglass dividing an apparatus with a checkered pattern, made to seem as though there is a dangerous drop-off between the sides, infants would not cross the deep side of the visual cliff, showing they perceived and understood significance of relative size

motor and visual development

walking offers more visual information than crawling, so motor development benefits visual and cognitive development

unimodal distribution of speech sounds

when a single speech sound has a single meaning

predicting novelty/familiarity preference

when an infant has been habituated to a stimulus, we predict the infant will prefer to look more at an unfamiliar stimulus, in social contexts, infants prefer faces they are familiar with and more attractive as rated by adults, or faces that are the average of all faces they have seen so far, when faced with two complex stimuli, infants prefer the more familiar or easier stimulus, prefer patterns over solid colours

tonic neck reflex

when an infant's head turns to one side, the arm on the other side of the body extends, while the other flexes

discriminatory learning at subordinate or individual level

when learning individual monkey faces with corresponding name, infants had increased ability to later discriminate the faces and discriminate new faces, training without labels or with a universal label may change effects

bimodal distribution of speech sounds

when very similar or identical sounds have different meanings or contrast in meaning

rational learning in infants

young infants can make predictions about simple events and are sensitive to distribution of elements as source of information upon which to base future expectations, will generate inferences about the future based on prior data in multiple domains

face discrimination

young infants do not have a tightly organized prototype for human faces, allowing them to easily distinguish between monkey faces and faces of any race regardless of facial features, but adults are better at telling apart individual faces with features they are familiar with

study of non-native speech distinctions

younger infants are sensitive to non-native speech distinctions, older infants lose sensitivity, but can be trained to regain ability through listening to bimodal distribution of speech sounds in environment, but not when familiarized to a unimodal distribution