Chapter 6 Early Cognitive Foundations: Sensation, Perception, and Learning

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Chapter 6 Early Cognitive Foundations
Sensation, Perception, and Learning
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Early Controversies about Sensory and Perceptual
Development

• Nature vs. nurture
• Nativist philosophers argue that many basic
  perceptual abilities are innate.
• Empiricist philosophers believed infants are born
  tabula rasa (blank slate) and must learn to
  interpret sensations.
• Enrichment vs. differentiation
• Enrichment theory claims that sensory stimulation
  is often fragmented or confusing.
• Differentiation theory argues that sensory
  stimulation provides all we need to interpret our
  experiences.

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"Making Sense" of the Infant's Sensory and
Perceptual Experiences

• The preference method
• Two stimuli are presented simultaneously to see
  whether infants will attend more to one of them
  than the other.
• Robert Fantz's looking chamber
• The habituation method
• Most popular strategy for measuring infant
  sensory and perceptual capabilities
• Infants habituate and dishabituate to many
  different kinds of stimulation
• Evoked potentials Brain wave patterns are
  studied.
• High-amplitude sucking Infants are provided with
  a special pacifier containing electrical
  circuitry that enables them to exert some control
  over the sensory environment.

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Infant Sensory Capabilities

• Vision
• Least developed sense in the newborn
• Visual acuity of newborn 20/600
• Hearing
• Reactions to voices Especially attentive to
  high-pitched feminine voices
• Reactions to language Infants can discriminate
  phonemes very early in life.
• Consequences of hearing loss Could hamper
  language development
• Taste and smell
• Infants are born with preference for sweet
  tastes.
• Infants are born capable of detecting a variety
  of odors.
• Touch, temperature, and pain Proprioceptor
  senses are functioning at birth.

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Infant Sensory Capabilities (cont.)
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Perception of Patterns and Forms in Infancy

• Early pattern perception (0 to 2 months)
• Prefer to look at whatever they can see well
• Later form perception (2 months to 1 year)
• Can use object movement to perceive form
• Explaining form perception
• Growth of form perception results from a
  continuous interplay among baby's inborn
  equipment, biological maturation, and visual
  experiences.

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Perception of Three-Dimensional Space in Infancy

• Size constancy
• Recognizing that an object remains the same size
  even when its image on the retina becomes larger
  as the object moves closer, or smaller as the
  object moves farther away
• Binocular vision enhances this capability.
• Binocular vision emerges around 3 to 5 months of
  age.
• Use of pictorial cues
• 7-month-olds seem able to use pictorial cues,
  while 5-month-olds cannot.

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Perception of Three-Dimensional Space in Infancy
(cont.)

• Development of depth perception
• Visual cliff experiment
• Infants detect a difference between the deep and
  shallow sides.
• Motor development and depth perception
• Self-produced movement helps develop depth
  perception.

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Visual Cliff

• Visual cliff

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Perception of Three-Dimensional Space in Infancy
(cont.)
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Intermodal Perception

• The senses are integrated at birth or shortly
  thereafter.
• Development of intermodal perception improves
  dramatically over the first year of life.
• Explaining intermodal perception is difficult,
  but seems consistent with the differentiation
  theory.

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Infant Perception in Perspectiveand a Look Ahead

• Perceptual learning in childhood Gibsons
  differentiation theory
• Perceptual learning occurs when we actively
  explore and detect distinctive features.
• Cultural influences on perception
• Subtle, but important effects
• Newborns are equipped to perceive "musicality"
  and to discriminate good music from bad music.
• Humans learn not to hear certain phonemes if they
  are not distinctive to the language spoken.

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Infant Perception in Perspectiveand a Look Ahead
(cont.)

• Figure 6.14
• Examples of figures used to test childrens
  ability to detect the distinctive features of
  letterlike
• forms. Stimulus 1 is the standard. The childs
  task is to examine each of the comparison stimuli
• (stimuli 27) and pick out those that are the
  same as the standard. Adapted from
• Gibson et al.,1962.

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Basic Learning Processes

• Individual now thinks, perceives, or reacts to
  the environment in a new way
• Result of a person's experiences
• Change is relatively permanent.

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Habituation Early Evidence of Information-Proces
sing and Memory

• Process by which we stop attending or responding
  to a stimulus repeated over and over
• Improves dramatically throughout the first year
  of life
• Individual differences
• Infants who habituate rapidly during the first
  six to eight months of life are quicker to
  understand and use language during the second
  year of life.

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Classical Conditioning

• A neutral stimulus that initially has no effect
  on the child eventually elicits a response of
  some sort, because it is associated with a second
  stimulus that always elicits the response.
• Classical conditioning of emotions
• Little Albert
• UCS loud banging noise
• UCR fearful behavior
• CS rat
• CR fearful behavior
• Even newborns can be classically conditioned.

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Classical Conditioning (cont.)

• Figure 6.15 The three phases of
• classical conditioning. In the
• preconditioning phase, the
• unconditioned stimulus (UCS)
• always elicits an unconditioned
• response (UCR), whereas the
• conditioned stimulus (CS) never
• does. During the conditioning
• phase, the CS and UCS are
• paired repeatedly and eventually
• associated. At this point, the
• learner passes into the
• postconditioning phase, in which
• the CS alone elicits the original
• response (now called a
• conditioned response, or CR)

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Operant (or Instrumental) Conditioning

• Four possible consequences of operant responses
• Positive reinforcement Something pleasant is
  added to increase response.
• Negative reinforcement Something unpleasant is
  removed to increase response.
• Positive punishment Something unpleasant is
  added to decrease response.
• Negative punishment Something pleasant is
  removed to decrease response.
• Operant conditioning in infancy is at best
  limited in early infancy.
• Infants can remember what they have learned.
• The social significance of early operant learning
  is evident in infants and their caregivers.

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Operant (or Instrumental) Conditioning (cont.)

• Figure 6.16
• Basic principles of operant conditioning

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Operant (or Instrumental) Conditioning (cont.)
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Observational Learning

• Newborn imitation can be observed for facial
  expressions.
• Advances in imitation and observational learning
  become obvious around 8 to 12 months of age.
• Grade school children are capable of verbally
  describing model's behavior, and are better at
  imitating the model.