Infancy

1
Infancy

• Chapter 5

2
Reflexes

• Newborn Reflexes
• Survival
• breathing, sucking, swallowing
• Primitive
• Babinski, swimming, grasping

3
(No Transcript)
4
(No Transcript)
5
Infant States
6
Infant States

• Most time asleep
• 16-18 hours a day
• Average 2-year-old 12-13 hours
• Changes ? brain maturation and social environment

7

• Do infants see/hear/smell/feel the same things we
  do???

8

• Sensation
• Perception

9
Assessing Infant Perception

• Preferential Looking Technique

10
Assessing Infant Perception

• Preferential Looking Technique (cont)
• Patterns to solids
• Infant visual acuity
• Faces to other patterns
• Tells us preference
• No preference doesnt prove infants cant
  discriminate

11
Assessing Infant Perception

• Habituation
• Familiarity ? lack of response
• Dishabituation
• Three methods
• Looking
• High amplitude sucking
• Heart rate
• Several presentations of a stimulus for
  habitutation to occur

12
(No Transcript)
13
(No Transcript)
14
(No Transcript)
15
Assessing Infant Perception

• Evoked Potentials
• Brain waves
• Different brain wave patterns

16
(No Transcript)
17
Learning in Infancy

• Classical Conditioning
• Unconditioned stimulus (UCS) elicits an
  unconditioned response (UCR)
• Neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) paired with
  (UCS)
• Eventually CS elicits a conditioned response (CR)
• Possible for newborns, but must have survival
  value

18
Learning in Infancy

• Operant Conditioning
• Learner emits a response
• Consequences
• Repeat favorable, limit unfavorable
• Newborns learn very slowly, rate increases with
  age
• At 2 months, context-dependent

19
Figure 5.15 When ribbons are attached to their
ankles, 2- to 3-month-old infants soon learn to
make a mobile move by kicking their legs. But do
they remember how to make the mobile move when
tested days or weeks after the original learning?
These are the questions that Rovee-Collier has
explored in her fascinating research on infant
memory.
20
Learning in Infancy

• Observational Learning
• Newborn imitation
• Imitation of novel responses
• Immediate imitation, then deferred imitation

21
(No Transcript)
22
Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities

• Touch, Temperature, and Pain
• Particularly sensitive on hands, feet, and mouth
• Temperature
• Pain even at 1 day
• Dishabituate sucking to novel objects at 3 months
• Prefer to manipulate novel objects at 5 months

23
Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities

• Taste
• Sweet, salty, sour, bitter
• Prefer sweet
• How do we know???
• Present before birth?

24
Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities

• Smell
• Unpleasant smells
• Breastfed babies recognize mothers
• 6 days
• 2 day old cannot
• Bottle-fed infants later

25
Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities

• Hearing
• Discriminate sounds
• Loudness
• Duration
• Direction
• Frequency
• Prefer mothers voice
• Phonemes
• Hearing loss

26
Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities

• Vision
• Least mature
• Muscles weak
• Cells in retina not mature or dense
• Optic nerve and relay pathways immature
• Visual acuity poor
• Neonate 20/600
• 6 months 20/100
• Adultlike at one year

27
(No Transcript)
28
(No Transcript)
29
Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities

• Vision (cont)
• Spatial frequency gradings

30
Sensory/Perceptual Capabilities

• Vision (cont)
• Color perception
• Certain hues
• By 2-3 months, all basic colors
• By 4 months, group different shades into same
  category
• Biological timetable

31
Visual Perception

• Identifying boundaries Spelke
• 3 to 5 month olds shown two objects
• touched vs. separated
• stationary vs. moving (either independently or
  together)

32
Visual Perception

• Results
• objects touched, stood still, or moved in the
  same direction ? reached for them as a whole
• objects separated or moved in opposite directions
  ? behaved as distinct
• repeated with objects of different shapes,
  colors
• motion and spatial arrangement ? identification
  of objects not shape, texture, and color

33

• Figure 5.7 Perceiving objects as wholes. An
  infant is habituated to a rod partially hidden by
  the block in front of it. The rod is either
  stationary (A) or moving (B). When tested
  afterward, does the infant treat the whole rod
  (C) as familiar? We certainly would, for we
  could readily interpret cues that tell us that
  there is one long rod behind the block and would
  therefore regard the whole rod as familiar. But
  if the infant shows more interest in the whole
  rod (C) than in the two rod segments (D), he or
  she has apparently not been able to use available
  cues to perceive a whole rod. ADAPTED FROM
  KELLMAN SPELKE, 1983.

34
Depth Perception
35
Visual Perception

• Depth Perception (cont)
• Radar young infants in walkers
• Readily crossed deep side of cliff
• Held Hein
• Self-propelled movement

36
Visual Perception

• Face Perception
• Newborns ? faces over patterns (Fantz)
• Maurer Barrera
• habituated 1 and 2 month olds to scrambled face
• test infant saw 3 patterns, one at a time
• the habituation pattern
• a different (symmetrical) scrambled face
• a naturally arranged face

37
Visual Perception

• Face perception (cont)
• 1 month equal looking at all 3 test patterns
• 2 months dishabituate to new patterns look
  most at natural face

38
(No Transcript)
39
Visual Perception

• Particular faces by 3 months
• Attractive over unattractive
• Langlois and colleagues
• Found in 3-, 6-, and 12-month-old infants, as
  well as in older children and adults

40
Intermodal Perception

• Integration at Birth?
• Yes reaching for objects that are seen
• Yes looking in the direction of sounds
• Yes expecting to see source of sound, or to feel
  objects that were reached for

41
Intermodal Perception

• Integrating sensory information from 2 or more
  modalities
• (differs from text)
• Spelke (1979) 4-month-olds film

42
Cross-Modal Perception/Transference

• Ability to recognize an object through one sense
  that was familiar only through another
• Some research connects cross-modal transference
  and habituation speed with later intelligence and
  language skills