Perception By: Sandra Rodriguez

 Perception creates an object from sensory stimulation.  Our perceptual processes determine that certain features go together to form objects.  Perception of objects is limited to newborns but develops rapidly in the first few months after birth.  4 month old infants use a number of cues to determine which elements go together to form an object.

 Motion: Elements that move together are usually part of the same object.  Color, Texture, Aligned Edges, and Motion are all clues to object unity.  Mothers provide Visual and taste cues for their baby.

 The human face is the most important object to a baby.  1 month old infants look mostly at the outer edges of the face.  Three month old infants focus almost entirely on the interior of the face. Particularly the eyes and the lips.

 Infants experiences are best described as “multimedia events.”  Many stimulants, stimulate more then one sense.  Rattle: stimulates vision, hearing, and touch.  Temporal information such as duration or tempo can be seen or heard.  Texture of a surface can be detected by sight or feel.

 Infants can recognize visually objects they have previously touched.  Similarly they can detect relations between information presented visually and auditory such as duration and rhythm.  Infants sensory systems are particularly attuned to intersensory redundancy.  Intersensory redundancy is information that is presented simultaneously to different sensory modes.  The importance of intersensory redundancy in infant perception.

 If a person claps slowly at first but then quickly, infants should be able to detect this change more readily if they see and hear the clapping than if they can see or hear but not both.  This study was done with eight 5 month olds.  It was to study was the manner in which the information was presented some pared to the change in infants looking at the video on the test trials.  It was found that infants detect the change in the rhythm, they should look more at the video following the change.  It was also found that redundancy has a powerful impact on the deployment of attention.  They are going to also study thee combination of vision and touch, and vision and taste.

 Infant’s sensory and perceptual skills are impressive.  Thank you