Perceptual Development
100
Nativist theorists claim that perceptual abilities are inborn.
True or False
True
The study of perceptual development was one of the historic battlegrounds for the dispute about the significance of nature versus nurture in development. Nativists claim that most perceptual abilities were inborn, while empiricists argue that these skills were learned. Developmentalists are now rethinking the relationship that exists between nature and nurture and how they interact with each other to determine development
200
Early studies established that as early as ______________, babies can discriminate between speech sounds like pa and ba.
A) 1 month
B) 2 months
C) 3 months
D) 4 month
A) 1 month (Answer)
300
Based on this picture and making a connection to the baby’s perception of the toy in his mouth, how does this play importance to his perception about the toy?
Research suggests that intermodal perception is important in infant learning and helps babies adapt to and synchronize multisensory information flowing in from the environment. Even though 7-month-old Grey is not looking at this toy while he chews on it, he is none the-less learning something about how it ought to look, based on how it feels in his mouth and in his hands—an example of cross-modal transfer
400
What do we know about baby’s and their ability to discriminate from sound patterns and individual voices?
Discriminating Individual Voices Newborns can tell the mother’s voice from another female voice (but not the father’s voice from another male voice) and prefers the mother’s voice. Moreover, there is a correlation between gestational age and maternal voice recognition: Premature infants are less likely to recognize their mother’s voice than babies born at term. Thus, in utero learning appears to be responsible for newborns’ preference for the maternal voice. Discriminating Other Sound Patterns Infants pay attention to, and discriminate among, patterns or sequences of sounds from the very beginning. As early as 6 months of age, babies listen to melodies and recognize the patterns. Trehub trained 6-month-old babies to turn their heads toward a loudspeaker for a particular six-tone melody and then tested the babies with melodies that varied in a number of ways. Babies continued to turn their head to new melodies if the melodies had the same contour (notes going up and down in the same sequence) and were in approximately the same pitch range. They responded to the melodies as different if the contour changed or if the notes were much higher or much lower. Thus, as is true with patterns of looking, within the first few months of life, babies appear to pay attention to and respond to sound patterns, not just the specific sounds
500
Describe the depth perception abilities of infants.
Outline the research of Albert Caron and Rose Caron, and what was the impact of this study on child development?
It is possible to judge depth by using any (or all) of three rather different kinds of information.
First, binocular cues involve both eyes, each of which receives a slightly different visual image of an object; the closer the object is, the more different these two views are. In addition, of course, information from the eye muscles tells you something about how far away an object may be.
Second, pictorial information, sometimes called monocular cues, requires input from only one eye. For example, when one object is partially in front of another one, you know that the partially hidden object is farther away—a cue called interposition. The relative sizes of two similar objects, such as two telephone poles or two people you see in the distance, may also indicate that the smaller-appearing one is farther away. Linear perspective (e.g., the impression that railroad lines are getting closer together as they get farther away) is another monocular cue. Third, kinetic cues come from either your own motion or the motion of some object: If you move your head, objects near you seem to move more than objects farther away (a phenomenon called motion parallax).
Similarly, if you see objects moving, such as a person walking across a street or a train moving along a track, closer objects appear to move over larger distances in a given period of time. With younger babies, researchers have studied kinetic cues by watching babies react to apparently looming objects. Most often, the baby observes a film of an object moving toward him, apparently on a collision course. If the infant has some depth perception, then he should flinch, move to one side, or blink as the object appears to come very close. Such flinching has been observed in 3-month-olds.
Between 2 and 3 months, the cortex has developed more fully, and the baby’s attention seems to shift from where an object is to what an object is. Babies this age begin to scan rapidly across an entire figure rather than getting stuck on edges. As a result, they spend more time looking for patterns.
One early study that illustrates this point particularly well comes from the work of Albert Caron and Rose Caron (1981), who used stimuli like those in Figure 4.7 in a habituation procedure. The babies were first shown a series of pictures that shared some particular relationship—for example, a small figure positioned above a larger version of the same figure (small over big). After the baby stopped being interested in these training pictures (i.e., after he habituated), the Carons showed him another figure (the test stimulus) that either followed the same pattern or followed some other pattern. If the baby had really habituated to the pattern of the original pictures (small over big), he should show little interest in stimuli like test stimulus A in Figure 4.7 (“Ho hum, same old boring small over big thing”), but he should show renewed interest in test stimulus B (“Hey, here’s something new!”).
Caron and Caron found that 3- and 4-month-old children did precisely that. So even at this early age, babies find and pay attention to patterns, not just specific stimuli.