PSYCH 1XX3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Infant Visual Development, Teddy Bear, Subjective Constancy
Document Summary
The infant visual development proceeds relatively quickly in the first few months of life. It turns out that infants prefer to look at patterns more than plain stimuli. Some studies suggest that infants are starting to get a handle on brightness, colour and shape constancy by as young as 4 months of age. Some researchers have argued that even newborns prefer to look at faces over any other pattern. This innate preference has evolved to ensure that as infants, we orient toward other people and not other objects in our environment. All of these studies suggest that we are born with a readiness to perceive and prefer face stimuli compared to other stimuli. For instance, one study raised kittens in a cylinder that had vertical stripes painted on the walls only. These kittens failed to developed proper feature detectors for horizontal stripes, and as a result, they were unable to see horizontal edges and objects in their environment.
