PSYC 335 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Motor Skill, Depth Perception
19 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Scale Errors
Toddlers make scale errors
do children understand size of different toys?
Attempts do something with a miniature replica object that is far too small for the action to
be at all possible (DeLoache and Rosengren, 2004)
Hypothesized to result from failure to integrate visual information represented in different
areas of brain
eg. Slide (child will slide down a mini slide), car (children will try to get into a toy car)
Perception: Taste and Smell
Sensitivity to taste and smell develops before birth.
Newborns have an innate preference for sweet flavours.
Newborns prefer the smell of breast milk and by two weeks of age appear to be able to
differentiate the scent of their own mothers from that of other women.
Perception: Touch
Infants learn about the environment through active touch.
Oral exploration dominates for the first few months.
Around 4 months of age, infants gain greater control over their hand and arm movements
Manual exploration gradually takes precedence over oral exploration
Intermodal perception
Involves the combination of information from two or more senses
Very young infants
Link sight and sound, oral and visual experience, and visual and tactile experience
Motor Development: Reflexes
Reflexes
Innate, fixed patterns of action that occur in response to particular stimulation
In newborns
Some reflexes have clear adaptive value
Others have no known adaptive significance
Cultural Difference
Degree to which motor skills are encouraged varies from culture to culture
Early locomotion actively discouraged
Modern urban China
Aché of rain forest of Paraguay
Early locomotion actively encouraged
Kipsigis of rural Kenya
Groups in West Africa and West Indies
Dynamic Systems View of the Stepping Reflex
Early theory
Stepping reflex typically disappears around 2 months of age as result of cortical maturation
Zelazo and colleagues (1972)
Stepping reflex continued to show after 2 months when infants given practice; cortical
maturation cannot account for vanishing
Thelen and colleagues (1984)
Normal disappearance of the stepping reflex is not caused by cortical maturation
Document Summary
Attempts do something with a miniature replica object that is far too small for the action to be at all possible (deloache and rosengren, 2004) Hypothesized to result from failure to integrate visual information represented in different areas of brain. Eg. slide (child will slide down a mini slide), car (children will try to get into a toy car) Sensitivity to taste and smell develops before birth. Newborns have an innate preference for sweet flavours. Newborns prefer the smell of breast milk and by two weeks of age appear to be able to differentiate the scent of their own mothers from that of other women. Infants learn about the environment through active touch. Oral exploration dominates for the first few months. Around 4 months of age, infants gain greater control over their hand and arm movements. Manual exploration gradually takes precedence over oral exploration. Involves the combination of information from two or more senses.
