Psychology 2040A/B Chapter 6: Chapter 6 - Textbook Notes
8 Feb 2012
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Empiricist philosophers believed that an infant was a tabula rasa who must learn to interpret sensations. Nativist philosophers took the nature side, arguing that many basic perceptual abilities are innate. Today s developmentalists take less extreme stands on the nature/nurture issue: they recognize that the perceptual world of a human neonate is rather limited and that both maturational processes and experience contribute to the growth of perceptual awareness. Research methods used to study the infant s sensory & In the early 1900 s, medical texts claimed that human infants were functionally blind, deaf, and impervious to pain for several days after birth. Babies were believed to be unprepared to extract any meaning from the world around them. Preference method: simple procedure in which at least two stimuli are presented simultaneously to see whether infants will attend more to one of them than the other. Early results suggested that the ability to detect and discriminate patterns is innate.
