1. CHAPTER 5

2. ◦ 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.  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.  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.  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.  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