PSY1017: Developmental Psychology - Perceptual Knowledge and Action in Infancy

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering perceptual knowledge, research methodologies, face processing theories, and cognitive development in infancy from Developmental Psychology (PSY1017).

Neonatal Reflexes

Inborn, automatic motor responses to specific stimuli present at birth (such as rooting, sucking, Moro/startle, palmar grasp, plantar grasp, Babinski, and stepping) that prepare the infant for postnatal life and survival.

Inter-Sensory Integration

The developmental process by which infants combine and coordinate sensory input received across multiple sensory modalities simultaneously, such as watching an adult make gestures while listening to a nursery rhyme.

Cross-Modal Transfer

The perceptual capacity of an infant to process information obtained through one sensory modality and recognize or apply that information in a different sensory modality (e.g., visually identifying a textured dummy previously explored only by oral touch).

Non-Nutritive Sucking (NNS)

An experimental research method that measures variations in an infant's sucking rate on a pacifier to assess their ability to discriminate sensory stimuli, such as speech sounds, pitch contours, or native versus non-native language rhythms.

Visual Acuity

The ability to resolve and discriminate fine-grained visual detail. It is poor at birth due to an underdeveloped visual cortex, improves rapidly during the first 6 months to just below adult levels, and reaches full development after 1 year of age.

Preferential Looking

An experimental technique designed to assess infant perception and discrimination by presenting two visual stimuli simultaneously and measuring spontaneous looking time, based on an innate preference for pattern or novelty.

Pareidolia

A psychological phenomenon where the mind perceives an illusory, recognizable pattern—such as a human face—in ambiguous or random visual and auditory stimuli (e.g., perceiving facial features in clouds, shadows, or electrical sockets).

CONSPEC

A subcortical structural face-processing mechanism proposed by Morton and Johnson (1991) that operates at birth without prior experience, biasing neonates to orient towards stimuli matching the basic structural configuration of human faces.

CONLERN

A cortical face-processing mechanism proposed by Morton and Johnson (1991) that enables infants to acquire detailed representations and knowledge about individual human faces through visual attention and perceptual experience.

Attractiveness Effect

The finding that infants less than 3 days old display a visual preference for attractive faces, interpreted theoretically as an attraction to prototypical facial configurations produced by cognitive averaging.

Scheme (Piaget)

In Jean Piaget's cognitive theory, a fundamental cognitive structure or unit of understanding that organizes an individual's actions and mental representations, functioning as a filter for interpreting new environmental information.

Object Permanence

The cognitive understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are hidden from sight and no longer directly perceived; Piaget proposed this begins to emerge around 9 months of age and matures fully near 2 years of age.

A-not-B Error

A search error typical of infants around 9 months old, where they continue searching for an object in its original hiding location (A) despite having observed it being hidden in a new, second location (B).

Violation of Expectations

A research methodology evaluating infant cognition by assessing looking time to impossible versus possible physical events; prolonged gaze at impossible outcomes demonstrates an awareness that a principle of physical reality has been violated.

Subitising

The rapid, direct perceptual apprehension of numerical quantities in small sets of objects (such as 2 or 3) without the need for conscious, sequential counting.