Chapter 5: Infant Perception, Learning and Cognition

1 month vs. 2 month old scanning a face

1 month old looks at contour of face and head, with few fixations on eyes 2 month old fixates on internal features of face, esp. eyes and mouth

Accurate visual perception of the world requires what elements?

1. acuity 2. systematic scanning 3. pattern perception

Two pieces of evidence of infants' attention to intention

1. box forehead example 2. dumbbell example

Two reasons for infants' poor contrast sensitivity

1. immaturity of their cones 2. for first months or so, they don't experience a colorful world

Two types of methods used to study infants' perception and understanding of the world

1. preferential-looking technique 2. habituation

Examples of affordances

1. small objects afford the possibility of being picked up 2. liquid affords the possibility of being poured or spilled

Evidence for infants ability to mentally represent and think about objects that are out of sight

1. they will reach for objects in the dark 2. can think about the object's characteristics (size) in the dark

Evidence that older infants' preference for prettiness, also affects their behavior toward real people

12 month olds interacted with a woman whose face was either attractive or ugly. positive towards attractive face, would play with her, and wouldn't be withdrawn vs. with ugly face

Example of how older infants interpret abstract displays in terms of intention and goal-directed action

12-month olds saw a computer animation of a ball repeatedly jumping over a barrier toward a ball on the other side. adults interpret this display as jumping ball's wanting to get the other ball. infants did too. when the barrier was removed, the infants looked longer when they saw the ball continue to jump, just as it had done before, than when they saw it move straight to the second ball.

Example of how infants and young children can draw inferences about other people's knowledge states

15 month olds can make inferences about what a person will do based on their knowledge of what the person knows. Visual attention version of false-belief task where infants seem to keep track of what info an adult has about the location of an object. Indicates that 15 month olds assume that a person's behavior will be based on what the person believes to be true, even if the infant knows the belief is false.

Observational learning/imitation: Dumbbell

18-month olds observed an adult attempting but failing to pull apart a small dumbbell toy. hands kept slipping off of it. when infants were given it, they pulled it apart, therefore imitating what the adults had intended to do, not what they had actually done.

Example of how infants are highly sensitive to the regularity with which one event follows another

2 to 8 month olds were habituated to six simple visual shapes that were presented one after another with specified levels of probability. the infants looked longer when the structure inherent in the initial set was violated.

How old are infants when they are able to track moving objects smoothly?

2-3 months and only if the object is moving slowly

At what age does manual exploration gradually take precedence over oral?

4 months

By age of what is infant imitation robust?

6 months

How can infants use info in one modality to interpret ambiguous info in another?

7 month olds listened to a musical rhythm that was ambiguous and could be interpreted in either duple or triple time. while infants were listening, they were bounced up and down at a rate matching either a duple or triple-time interpretation of the ambiguous rhythm. when tested, infants preferred to listen to the version of the rhythm that fit the pattern in which they were bouncing. how they were bounced altered how they interpreted what they were hearing.

By how old are infants' visual acuity, scanning patterns and color perception similar to adults?

8 months

Who were the two early pioneers in the study of motor development and what did they conclude about infants' motor development?

Arnold Gesell and Myrtle McGraw. they conflicted that infants' motor development is governed by brain maturation.

What is the modern view on early sensation and perception?

Infants come into the world with all their sensory systems functioning to some degree and that subsequent development occurs at a very rapid pace.

Example of a common regularity

Mom's voice is followed by the appearance of her face

Do many researchers share James's view?

No because of remarkable advances in the study of early sensation and perception.

Example of how young infants attribute intention with respect to simple displays involving small objects

a ball is seen trying to move up a hill, but then rolling back down, thereby failing to achieve its goal of reaching the top. on some trials, after the ball starts to roll back down, a triangle appears bellow the ball and seems to push it upward, helping it get to the top. on other trials, a cube appears in front of the ball and hinders it by seeming to push it down the hill. both adults and infants readily interpret it in terms of intentional action.

Auditory localization

a factor that adds to infants' auditory improvement. it is the perception of the location in space of a sound source.

Classical conditioning

a form of learning that consists of associating an initially neutral stimulus with a stimulus that always evokes a particular reflexive response

Preferential-looking technique

a method for studying visual attention in infants that involves showing infants two patterns or two objects at a time to see if the infants have a preference for one over the other

Habituation

a method used to study sensory and perceptual development in infants that involves repeatedly presenting an infant with a particular stimulus until the infant's response to it habituates (declines). a novel stimulus is then presented. if the infant's response to it increases, the researcher infers that the baby can discriminate between the old and new stimulus.

Stepping reflex

a neonatal reflex in which an infant lifts first one leg and then the other in a coordinated pattern like walking

Common movement

a powerful cue that leads infants to perceive disparate elements moving together as parts of a unitary object

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 knows to be true

Positive reinforcement

a reward that reliably follows a behavior and increases the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated

Subjective contour

a striking demonstration of integrative pattern perception in infancy in which you may see a shape (square) even when it doesn't actually exist on the page

Statistical learning

a type of learning that involves simply picking up information from the environment, specifically, detecting statistically predictable patterns

What allows infants' to discriminate between different faces?

a well-organized perceptual prototype for human faces (developed over first months)

Motor milestones

achievement of the major motor milestones of infancy, esp. walking, constitutes a major advance and provides new ways for infants to interact with the world

Where does perception of subjective contour result form?

active integration of the separate elements in the stimulus into a single pattern vs. viewing them separately

Pattern perception

analyzing and integrating separate elements of a visual display into a coherent pattern

When in life are statistical learning mechanisms available?

at birth if not before due to the evidence that newborn infants track statistical regularities in these domains (music, action, speech)

Goldilocks effect

avoiding patterns that are either too easy or too hard while continuing to focus on those that are just right, given the infant's learning abilities, suggesting that infants allocate attention differently to different learning problems, preferentially attending to those patterns that are the most informative

Why are infants fascinated with human faces?

because of a very general bias toward configurations with more elements in the upper half than int he lower half

Why do infants have trouble tracking moving stimuli?

because their eye movements ar jerky and often do not stay with whatever they are trying to visually follow

Why do infants typically prefer to look at patterns of high visual contrast?

because young infants have poor contrast sensitivity and can detect a pattern only when it is composed of highly contrasting elements

When does sensitivity to taste and smell develop?

before birth, newborns prefer sweet flavors

Piaget's theory of sensorimotor intelligence

believed that young infants understand ing of the world is beverly limited by an inability to mentally represent and think about anything that they cannot currently see

In the preferential-looking technique, infants preferred looking at what kind of pattern?

black and white stripes over a plain surface

Kellman and Spelke (1983)

classic experiment that demonstrates the importance of motion as a cue indicating the boundaries between objects. first, 4-month olds were presented with the display (a). could be perceived either as two pieces of a rod moving on each end of a block of wood or as a single rod moving back and forth behind the block (adults). if infants assumed that there was a single intact rod moving behind the block during habituation, they would look longer at the broken rod because that display would be relatively novel. that is what the babies did.

Prereaching movements

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

What caused infants to perceive the two rod segments presented during habituation as parts of a unitary object?

common movement. the two segments always moved together in the same direction and at the same speed.

Xu & Garcia (2008)

demonstrated that 8-month-olds could make predictions about simple events. infants were shown a box containing 75 ping-pong balls that were mostly red and some white. infants look longer at display with white balls indicating that they were surprised that the experimenter drew mostly white balls from box.

Carolyn Rovee-Collier (1997)

developed an instrumental conditioning procedure for studying learning and memory in young infants. in this method, experimenters tie a ribbon around a baby's ankle and connect it to a mobile hanging above the infant's crib. in the course of naturally kicking their legs, infants as young as 2 months of age quickly learn the relation between their leg movements and the enjoyable sight of jiggling mobile. they then increase their rate of foot kicking. this task has been long used extensively to investigate age-related changes in how long, and under what circumstances, infants continue to remember that kicking will activate the mobile. example of learning contingent between own behavior and an external event.

Classical conditioning is believed to be especially important in the learning of what?

emotional reactions

Infants' knowledge of gravity

even in first year of life, infants appreciate it. proven by series of studies in which infants observed a ball being released on a slope. 7-month olds but not 5-month olds looked longer when ball moved up the slope, indicating that they had expected it to go down.

Renée Baillargeon & co. (1985)

first used violation-of-expectancy technique. tried to see if infants too young to search for an invisible object might nevertheless have a mental representation of its existence. infants were first habituated to sight of a solid screen rotating back and forth through a 180 degree arc. box was then placed in screen's path. infants saw two test events: possible and impossible. infants 3.5 months looked longer at impossible event, thus indicating that infants did not expect screen to be able to pass through it. infant's behavior in this situation is also include by some of the characteristics of the occluded object (height). as they would expect the screen to stop sooner for a taller object vs. a shorter one.

Meltzoff and Moore (1977, 1983)

found thaat after newborns watch an adult model slowly and repeatedly stick out his or her tongue, they often stick out their own tongue

How does the degree to which motors skills are encouraged vary?

from culture to culture, thus impacting infants' development. example: diapers impact walking behavior. babies walked straighter when naked.

Examples of baby reflexes

grasping rooting sucking swallowing tonic neck

From birth, babies look longer at faces that are judged by adults to be what?

highly attractive

Nativists

hold that certain aspects of knowledge are innate or hardwired

Information that we're still trying to figure out

how cognition develops in infancy

Who relies more heavily on vision than most species?

humans

Observational learning/imitation: Box forehead example

if infants see a model learn over and touch a box with her forehead, they later do the same. if the model remarks that she's cold and tightly clutches a shawl around her body as she leans over and touches a box with her forehead, infants reach out and touch the box with their hand instead of their heads. they reason that the model wanted to touch what box and would have done so in a standard way if her hands had been free. their imitation is thus based on their analysis of the person's intentions.

Unconditioned response (UCR)

in classical conditioning, a reflexive response that is elicited by the unconditioned stimulus

Unconditioned stimulus (UCS)

in classical conditioning, stimulus that evokes a reflexive response

Conditioned stimulus (CS)

in classical conditioning, the neutral stimulus that is repeatedly paired with the unconditioned stimulus

Conditioned response (CR)

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

When does ORE emerge?

in infancy

Infants' cone immaturity

in infants, the cones have a different size and shape and are spaced farther apart than in adulthood. as a consequence, newborns' cones catch only 2% of light striking the fovea vs 65% for adults. why babies in first month have only about 20/120 vision. visual acuity develops so rapidly that by 8 months of age, infants' vision approaches that of adults, with full adult acuity present by around 6 years of age.

Evidence that shows that infants possess a variety of forms of auditory-visual intermodal perception

infants simultaneously view two different videos, side by side, while listening to a soundtrack that is synchronized with one of the videos but not the other. if an infant responds more to the video that goes with the soundtrack = evidence that infant detects common structure in the auditory and visual information

Active child theme

infants work hard at learning to predict and control their experience, and once control has been established, they dislike losing it

Piaget (1954) on intermodal perception

information from different sensory modalities is initially separate, and only after some months do infants become capable of forming associations between how things look and how they sound, taste, feel and so on

Reflexes

innate, fixed patterns of action that occur in response to particular stimulation

What are babies movements like after birth and why?

jerky and relatively uncoordinated because of physical and neurological immaturity

Statistical learning has been proposed to be of vital importance in what kind of learning?

language learning

Is common movement inherently known or learned?

learned because only at 2 months of age do infants show any evidence that they use common motion to interpret the occluded rod as a single object

Instrumental (or operant) conditioning

learning the relation between one's own behavior and the consequences that result from it

Empiricists

maintaining that all knowledge arises from experience

Roughly 40-50% of what is involved in visual processing?

mature cerebral cortex

How do infants diverge from adult listeners in certain other aspects of music perception?

melodic perception in which infants can make perceptual discriminations that adults can not

What domains have statistical learning abilities been measured across?

music, action, speech

Primary debate in cognitive development

nativists vs. empiricists

What is current research focused on in regard to imitative learning?

neural underpinnings

Visual scanning

newborns start visually scanning environment right away. from the beginning, they are attracted to moving stimuli.

Is Piaget's theory on intermodal perception true?

no. it has become increasingly clear that from very early on, infants integrate info from different senses. for example, infants link their oral and visual experiences (pacifier)

Mirror neuron system

one area that has received a good deal of attention as a potential locus for imitation. it was first identified in the ventral premotor cortex in nonhuman primates.

Optical expansion

one cue that infants are sensitive to very early on in which an object occludes increasingly more of the background, indicating that it is approaching

Yonas, Cleaves and Pettersen (1978)

one of the earliest studies of infants' sensitivity to monocular depth cues that capitalized on the fact that infants will reach toward whichever of two objects is nearer (trapezoidal window) indicating that they use relative size as a cue to depth

William James

one of the first psychology who believed that the world of the newborn is a "big blooming, buzzing confusion"

What kind of learning underlies the development of some intermodal perception?

perceptual learning

Perceptual narrowing

permits the developing child to become especially attuned to patterns in biological and social stimuli that are important in their environment

Experience with specific objects helps infants to understand their what?

physical properties

What aspects of music memory do infants hold onto?

pitch, timbre, tempo

Infants' color immaturity

poor color vision for first month or so. by 2 or 3 months, infants' color vision is similar to adults. they perceive boundaries between colors in more or less the same way as adults. they respond equivalently to two shades that adults label as the same color (blue) but they discriminate between two shades that adults refer to with different color names (blue and green)

How is infant music perception adult like?

preference for constant intervals over dissonant intervals. not due to musical experience made apparent by study with hearing infants whose mothers were deaf, making it unlikely that the infants would have had prenatal exposure to singing

Robert Fantz (1961)

preferential-looking technique

How do listeners localize a sound?

rely on differences in the sound that arrive at both of their ear

Current take on Piaget's theory of sensorimotor intelligence

skepticism arose about this theory and it has now been proved that young infants are in fact able to mentally represent and think about the existence of objects and events that are currently out of sight

Amanda Woodward (1998)

social knowledge experiment where infants were habituated to the event shown in (a), a hand repeatedly reaching for a ball on one side of a display. when tested later with displayed (b), (c), and (d), infants who saw the hand reach for the other object looked longer than did those who saw it reach for the ball (regardless of the ball's position). the pattern of results indicates that the babies interpreted the original reaching as object-directed.

Susan Johnson (2003)

social knowledge experiment with an amorphous bobbly object that "responds" contingently to infants, and thus they tend to attribute intention to it

Evidence for formation of a general face prototype in first year

study of infants' and adults' ability to discriminate between individual human face and individual monkey faces. adults, 9-month olds, and 6-month olds can all discriminate between two human faces. adults and 9-month olds have a great deal of difficulty telling different between one money and another. 6-month olds are just as good at discriminating between monkey faces as human faces. suggests that these younger infants have not yet developed a tightly organized prorate for human faces.

Evidence in support of this general bias to attend to face-like stimulus comes from studies showing what?

that humans are equally interest din human faces and monkey faces

What was the view on infant's vision decades ago?

that it was so poor it was barely functional

What is the current view on infant's vision?

that newborns begin visual exploring the world minutes after leaving the womb. they're able to scan the environment and pause to look at objects or people. although they don't see as clearly as adults, their vision improves extremely rapidly in first months.

Contrast sensitivity

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

Self-locomotion

the ability to move oneself around in the environment

Rational learning

the ability to use prior experiences to predict what will occur in the future

Scale errors

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

Fovea

the central region of the retina

Intermodal perception

the combining of information from two or more sensory systems

Despite their limited acuity and lack of visual experience, newborns re already attentive to what?

the configurations of elements in their visual world

Binocular disparity

the difference between the retinal image of an object in each eye that results in two slightly different signals being sent the brain

Differentiation

the extraction from the constantly changing stimulation in the environment of those elements that are invariant, or stable (happy tone of voice = smiling face)

The speed with which an infant habituates is believed to reflect what?

the general efficiency of the infant's processing of information (IQ scores)

Object segregation

the identification of separate objects in visual array through the use of movement info and knowledge of their surroundings

Eleanor Gibson (1988)

the key process in perceptual learning is differentiation

Cones

the light-sensitive neurons that are highly concentrated in the fovea

The presence of strong reflexes at birth is a sign that what?

the newborn's CNS is in good shape. therefore, reflexes that are unusually weak or vigorous may signal brain damage. and persistence of a neonatal reflex beyond the point at which it is expected to disappear can indicate a neurological problem.

Over the course of infancy, there are vast improvements in sound conduction from where?

the outer and middle ear to the inner ear and over the first year, auditory pathways in the brain mature significantly

Perceptual constancy

the perception of objects as being of constant size, shape, color, etc., in spite of physical differences in the retinal image of the object

Monocular depth (or pictorial) cues

the perceptual cues of depth (such as relative size and interposition) that can be perceived by one eye alone

Affordances

the possibilities for action offered by objects and situations (

Stereopsis

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

Perception

the process of organizing and interpreting sensory info about the objects, events and spatial layout of the world around us

Sensation

the processing of basic information from the external world by the sensory receptors in the sense organs (eyes, ears, skin) and the brain

Visual acuity

the sharpness of visual discrimination

Where does the majority of evidence that young infants can represent and think about invisible objects come from?

the violation of expectancy procedure

As they get older, what additional sources of info for object segregation do infants use?

their general knowledge about the world

Why may infants have more difficulty localizing a sound?

their heads are small thus the differences in timing and loudness in info arriving at each ear are smaller for infants than for toddlers and children with larger heads

What faces do infants prefer?

their mother's

How do infants go beyond attributing intentions to others based on their actions?

they exhibit preferences for particular individuals and objects based on the individuals' and objects' actions (preference of person with same language)

Diminished attention to what is familiar enables infants to do what?

to pay attention to, and learn about, what is new

Example of pattern perception

to perceive a face as 2 months old do, they must integrate the separate elements

Current views of motor development

today, theorists mainly take a dynamic-systems approach, emphasizing that early motor development results from a confluence of numerous factors that include developing neural mechanisms, increases in infants' strength, posture control, balance and perceptual skills as well as changes in body proportion and motivation

Origin of perceptual constancy

traditional component in debates between empiricists and nativists

Important aspect of social knowledge that emerges relatively early

understanding that the behavior of others is purposive and goal-driected

When do preferences for smells develop?

very early on in life, and newborns prefer the smell of breast milk and can differentiate their mother's scent from another woman's

When infants become capable of exporting objects manually, they readily integrate what experiences?

visual and tactile experiences

How does the human auditory system compared to the visual system at birth?

well developed relative to visual system

The other race effect (ORE)

well-established finding, initially observed in adults, in which individuals find it easier to distinguish between faces of individuals from their own racial group than between faces from other racial groups

Tonic neck reflex

when an infant's head turns or is turned to one side, the arm on that side of the body extends, while the arm and knee on the other side flex

In what ways do theorists of cognitive development vary?

with respect to relative roles they attribute to nature and nurture (whether development is guided by innate knowledge structures and special purpose learning mechanisms or by general learning mechanisms relevant to experiences in all domains)

Infants' developing understanding of support relations.

young infants appreciate that an object cannot float in midair, but only gradually do they come to understand under what conditions one object can be supported by another

How does perceptual narrowing also occur in intermodal perception?

young infants can detect correspondences between speech sounds and facial movements for nonnative speech sounds but older infants cannot. thus, experience fine-tunes the types of intermodal correspondences that infants detect