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PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT. CHAPTER 5. THINKING ABOUT PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT. Key battleground of nature vs. nuture debate Nativism (inborn) vs. empiricism (skills are learned) WAYS OF STUDYING EARLY PERCEPTUAL SKILLS Preference technique devised by Robert Fantz

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PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

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  1. PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 5

  2. THINKING ABOUT PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT • Key battleground of nature vs. nuture debate • Nativism (inborn) vs. empiricism (skills are learned) • WAYS OF STUDYING EARLY PERCEPTUAL SKILLS • Preference technique devised by Robert Fantz • Baby given two options, researchers track which one they look at more • Another option  habituation • Baby shown an object until habituated • A similar object is then shown to see if baby notices whether it is different

  3. EXPLANATIONS OF PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT • Arguments for Nativism • Researchers have found more and more skills already present in newborns and very young infants • Newborns don’t have to be taught what to look at • Studies comparing preterm babies shows importance of maturation age on perceptual development • Arguments for Empiricism • Research that shows some level of experience needed • Aslin – maintenance (ie. decrease of visual perception) • Attunement – deprivation of visual experiences in early stages

  4. Integrating the Nativist and Empiricist Positions • Development of perceptual skills is result of interaction between inborn and experiential factors (ie. nature AND nuture • Similar to hardware and software • Making visual discriminations is hardware • Specific discriminations and number of separate objects will depend on experience

  5. SENSORY SKILLS • SEEING • Until 25 to 30 years ago, many medical texts stated infants were blind • Visual acuity • Infant’s at birth is 20/200 to 20/400, but improves rapidly during the first year • Most reach 20/20 by about 2 years of age • Infants see quite well close up • Tracking Objects in the Visual Field • Following a moving object • Initially inefficient but improves rapidly • Some tracking at 2 months, but shift at around 6 to 10 months

  6. Colour Vision • Cells necessary to perceive red and green are clearly present by 1 month, perhaps at birth, blue probably present at that time as well • HEARING AND OTHER SENSES • Auditory Acuity • How newborns hear better than how they see • Children’s hearing improves up to adolescence • Within general range of pitch and loudness, newborns hear as well as adults • With high-pitched sounds, acuity is less than adult

  7. Detecting Locations • Determining general location of sound exists at birth and improves • Sounds arrive at one ear before another • Newborns will turn their head • Specific locations not well-developed • 27 degrees at 2 months, 12 degrees at 6 months, 4 degrees at 18 months • Smelling and Tasting • As in adults, intricately related • Newborns appear to respond differently to the four tastes • Sense of Touch and Motion • The best developed of all • Considerable fine-tuning occurs in first year

  8. PERCEPTUAL SKILLS • LOOKING • Depth Perception • Binocular cues – involving both eyes • Pictorial information – monocular cues • ie. linear perspective (railroad tracks seemingly getting closer) • Kinetic cues – objects near you move more than objects farther • kinetic information perhaps used beginning at 3 months • Binocular cues used at about 4 months • Pictorial cues used at about 5 to 7 months • The Gibson/Walk visual cliff experiment

  9. What Babies Look At • From the beginning, babies look at the world in a non-random way • In first 2 months, focused on where objects are • Between 2 to 3 months, focus on what an object is as opposed to where • Begin noticing patterns, horizontal/vertical, big/small • Faces: An Example of Responding to a Complex Pattern • Little indication that faces are uniquely interesting to infants • Face processing as young as 3 months • Prefer attractive faces and prefer mother’s face • Recognition of voice directs attention to face

  10. LISTENING • From 1 month, infants can discriminate between sounds • By 6 months, can discriminate between two-syllable words • Male or female doesn’t matter • COMBINING INFORMATION FROM MANY SENSES • Intersensory integration and cross-modal transfer • Cross-modal as early as 1 month, more common at 6 months • Intersensory is important in infant learning • Better able to recognize a new stimulus then with either stimulus alone • Preference for looking at visuals that match with a sound • Not a completely automatic process

  11. IGNORING PERCEPTUAL INFORMATION • Child must acquire set of rules called perceptual constancies • ie. size constancy, shape constancy, colour constancy • OBJECT constancy • Remain the same even when sensory information has changed • Babies show this at 3 or 4 months and become more skilled • When learning to read, child has to unlearn some shape constancies (ie. b and d, p and q)

  12. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN PERCEPTUAL SKILLS • Like physical development, perceptual development shows significant individual variations • Faster habituation by 4 to 5 months is associated with higher IQ at 3 or 4 years of age

  13. THE OBJECT CONCEPT • OBJECT PERCEPTION • Babies are born with built-in assumptions • ie. connected surface principle • Other skills are learned through experience • Babies “hypotheses” are modified based on experiences • Infants’ understanding of objects is the foundation upon which object concept is constructed and applied to real-life interaction over the first 3 years

  14. OBJECT PERMANENCE • Strongly emphasized in Piaget’s theory • Stages in the Development of Object Permanence • First sign is at 2 months of age • Child develops schema or expectation about permanence • not developed enough to lead to searching for an object • Changes at 6 to 8 months • By 12 months, objects continue to “exist” even when no longer visible • Object Permanence and Cultural Practices • Progression toward object permanence across first 18 months quite similar

  15. PERCEPTION OF SOCIAL SIGNALS • EARLY DISCRIMINATION OF EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIONS • Infants begin to pay attention to social/emotional cues at about 2 or 3 months • More when face is turned toward them • Also beginning to notice and respond differently to variations in others’ emotional expressions • By 5 to 7 months, can begin to read one “channel” – facial or vocal • Later in year one, develop “social referencing” responding to cues and reacts with equivalent concern or fear

  16. CROSS-CULTURAL COMMONALITIES AND VARIATIONS • Similarity with same “basic” emotions • ie. fear, happiness, sadness, anger and disgust • Cultures have different rules about which emotions may be expressed and which must be masked

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