PSY 213 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Subjective Constancy, Color Vision, Perceptual Learning
Chapter 5 - Seeing, Thinking, + Doing in Infancy PSY 213
JAN 31/18
Perception
Motor devel’
Learning
Cognition
Themes
- Active child
- Continuity/discontinuity
- Mechanisms of change & role of variability
- Sociocultural context contributions
Perception
Sensation
- Processing basic information from the external world by the sensory receptors in the
sense organs and brain
Perception
- Organizing and interpreting sensory information about the objects, events, and spatial
layout of the surrounding world
Perception: Vision
Research methods for studying infants’ vision
- Preferential-looking technique (Fantz, 1961)
- Infants are shown two patterns or two objects at a time to see if they have a
preference for one over the other
- Habituation
- Infant is repeatedly presented with a given stimulus until the response declines
Visual Acuity
- Involves the sharpness of visual discrimination
- Develops rapidly
- Can be estimated by comparing how long infant looks at research patterns
In young infants’
Infants prefer to look at patterns of high visual contrast because…
- They have poor contrast sensitivity
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- The cones of the eye, which are concentrated in the fovea, differ from adults' in size,
shape, and spacing.
- 20/120 vision in first month (large E on eye chart)
- They have limited color vision until 2-3 months of age.
Visual Scanning
- By 2-3mo, smooth slow-moving object tracking
- The lines superimposed on these face pictures show age differences in where two babies
fixated on the images
(a) A 1-month-old looked primarily at the outer contour of the face and head, with a few
fixations of the eyes.
(b) A 2-month-old fixated primarily on the internal features of the face, especially the eyes and
mouth.
Pattern Perception
- 2mo old infants can analyze + integrate separate elements of a visual display into a
coherent pattern
- newborns if motion cues added
- infants are also able to perceive coherence among moving elements
Facing the World: World of Faces
- At birth
- Infants are drawn to faces because of a general bias toward configurations with
more elements in the upper half than in the lower half
- After 12 hours of exposure
- From paying attention to real faces, the infant comes to recognize and prefer his
or her own mother's face
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Chapter 5 - Seeing, Thinking, + Doing in Infancy PSY 213
JAN 31/18
- Over first few months
- Detailed face prototype emerges to help the infant to discriminate between faces
Beauty + the Baby
- With experience, infants develop preference for the type of face they see most often and
begin to understand the significance of different facial expressions
- From birth, infants look longer & interact more positively with faces that adults find
more attractive
Other race effect (ORE)
- Posits that it is easier to distinguish between faces of those from own racial group
- Emerges in infancy
- Is driven by access of facial features in individual environment
Object Perception
Perceptual constancy
- Perception of objects as being of constant size, shape, color, in spite of physical
differences in the retinal image of the object
Empiricists
- All knowledge arises from experience
- Perception of constant size and shape of objects develops as a function of spatially
experiencing our environment
Nativists
- Certain aspects of knowledge are hardwired
- Perceptual regularity stems from inherent properties of the nervous system
- View supported by evidence of newborn perceptual constancy
Infant Object Segregation
Object segregation
- Identification of separate objects in a visual array; perception of boundaries between
objects.
Experimental findings
- Infants (after habituation), like adults, assumed there was a single intact rod moving
behind the block as evidenced by longer infant gaze at broken rod
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