1. Infancy
Chapter 5

2. Reflexes Newborn Reflexes Survival Primitive
breathing, sucking, swallowing
Primitive
Babinski, swimming, grasping

5. Infant States

6. Infant States Most time asleep Average 2-year-old = 12-13 hours
16-18 hours a day
Average 2-year-old = hours
Changes  brain maturation and social environment

7. Do infants see/hear/smell/feel the same things we do???

8. Sensation
Perception

9. Assessing Infant Perception
Preferential Looking Technique

10. Assessing Infant Perception
Preferential Looking Technique (con’t)
Patterns to solids
Infant visual acuity
Faces to other patterns
Tells us preference
No preference doesn’t prove infants can’t discriminate…

11. Assessing Infant Perception
Habituation
Familiarity  lack of response
Dishabituation
Three methods
Looking
High amplitude sucking
Heart rate
Several presentations of a stimulus for habitutation to occur

15. Assessing Infant Perception
Evoked Potentials
Brain waves
Different brain wave patterns

17. Learning in Infancy Classical Conditioning
Unconditioned stimulus (UCS) elicits an unconditioned response (UCR)
Neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) paired with (UCS)
Eventually CS elicits a conditioned response (CR)
Possible for newborns, but must have survival value

18. Learning in Infancy Operant Conditioning Learner emits a response
Consequences
Repeat favorable, limit unfavorable
Newborns learn very slowly, rate increases with age
At 2 months, context-dependent

19. Figure 5.15 When ribbons are attached to their ankles, 2- to 3-month-old infants soon learn to make a mobile move by kicking their legs. But do they remember how to make the mobile move when tested days or weeks after the original learning? These are the questions that Rovee-Collier has explored in her fascinating research on infant memory.

20. Learning in Infancy Observational Learning – Newborn imitation
Imitation of novel responses
Immediate imitation, then deferred imitation

22. Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities
Touch, Temperature, and Pain
Particularly sensitive on hands, feet, and mouth
Temperature
Pain – even at 1 day
Dishabituate sucking to novel objects at 3 months
Prefer to manipulate novel objects at 5 months

23. Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities
Taste
Sweet, salty, sour, bitter
Prefer sweet
How do we know???
Present before birth?

24. Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities
Smell
Unpleasant smells
Breastfed babies recognize mothers
6 days
2 day old cannot
Bottle-fed infants later

25. Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities
Hearing
Discriminate sounds
Loudness
Duration
Direction
Frequency
Prefer mother’s voice
Phonemes
Hearing loss

26. Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities
Vision
Least mature
Muscles weak
Cells in retina not mature or dense
Optic nerve and “relay” pathways immature
Visual acuity poor
Neonate 20/600
6 months 20/100
Adultlike at one year

29. Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities
Vision (con’t)
Spatial frequency gradings

30. Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities
Vision (con’t)
Color perception
Certain hues
By 2-3 months, all basic colors
By 4 months, group different shades into same category
Biological timetable

31. Visual Perception Identifying boundaries – Spelke
3 to 5 month olds shown two objects
touched vs. separated
stationary vs. moving (either independently or together)

32. Visual Perception Results
objects touched, stood still, or moved in the same direction  reached for them as a whole
objects separated or moved in opposite directions  behaved as distinct
repeated with objects of different shapes, colors
motion and spatial arrangement  identification of objects; not shape, texture, and color

33. Figure 5. 7 Perceiving objects as wholes
Figure 5.7 Perceiving objects as wholes. An infant is habituated to a rod partially hidden by the block in front of it. The rod is either stationary (A) or moving (B). When tested afterward, does the infant treat the whole rod (C) as “familiar”? We certainly would, for we could readily interpret cues that tell us that there is one long rod behind the block and would therefore regard the whole rod as familiar. But if the infant shows more interest in the whole rod (C) than in the two rod segments (D), he or she has apparently not been able to use available cues to perceive a whole rod. ADAPTED FROM KELLMAN & SPELKE, 1983.

34. Depth Perception

35. Visual Perception Depth Perception (con’t) Held & Hein
Radar: young infants in walkers
Readily crossed deep side of cliff
Held & Hein
Self-propelled movement

36. Visual Perception Face Perception
Newborns  faces over patterns (Fantz)
Maurer & Barrera
habituated 1 and 2 month olds to scrambled face
test: infant saw 3 patterns, one at a time:
the habituation pattern
a different (symmetrical) scrambled face
a naturally arranged face

37. Visual Perception Face perception (con’t)
1 month: equal looking at all 3 test patterns
2 months: dishabituate to new patterns – look most at natural face

39. Visual Perception Particular faces by 3 months
Attractive over unattractive
Langlois and colleagues
Found in 3-, 6-, and 12-month-old infants, as well as in older children and adults

40. Intermodal Perception
Integration at Birth?
Yes: reaching for objects that are seen
Yes: looking in the direction of sounds
Yes: expecting to see source of sound, or to feel objects that were reached for

41. Intermodal Perception
Integrating sensory information from 2 or more modalities
(differs from text…)
Spelke (1979): 4-month-olds film

42. Cross-Modal Perception/Transference
Ability to recognize an object through one sense that was familiar only through another
Some research connects cross-modal transference and habituation speed with later intelligence and language skills