OFFICIAL Ch4 Flashcards

Gibsons' ecological theory

Emphasizes the evolutionary foundations of perceptual abilities and the connection between perception and action, highlighting the infant as an active explorer of their environment.

Habituation-recovery tests

Involve presenting an infant with a stimulus until they become habituated; then, a new stimulus is presented to see if the infant's attention rebounds, suggesting discrimination between familiar and novel stimuli.

Taste preferences in infants

Infants are exposed to tastes through amniotic fluid and breast milk, where early experiences set the stage for later taste preferences, such as early exposure to salt leading to later tolerance for salt in food.

Infant visual acuity

Improves rapidly through the first six months, becoming adult-like by around eight months; contrast sensitivity also improves due to the physical maturation of the eye.

Preferential-looking paradigms

Methods where infants are shown different faces and their looking time is measured, revealing preferences for faces, especially top-heavy configurations and upright faces, suggesting an innate bias towards face perception.

Perceptual narrowing

Refers to the diminished ability to distinguish among stimuli due to a lack of experience, such as infants becoming better at distinguishing among women's faces than men's faces due to more exposure to female faces.

Auditory-visual integration studies

Reveal intermodal perception, showing that infants pay more attention to videos where the audio and visual stimuli are asynchronously presented, suggesting they expect these sensory inputs to be congruent.

Gesell's maturation theory

Posits that motor development is primarily determined by genetics and biological maturation, with skills developing in a predetermined order regardless of experience or practice.

Role of posture in motor skills

Plays a critical role in all motor skills by involving holding the head and body in a stable position, facilitating actions like sitting, reaching, and standing by providing a foundation for movement.

Motor Development

The process by which infants gain control over their body movements, influenced by cultural practices such as exercise or cradling.

Ecological Theory of Perception

A theory proposed by Eleanor and James Gibson emphasizing the evolutionary basis of human perceptual abilities and the connection between perception and action, viewing infants as active explorers of their environment.

Perception-Action Feedback Loop

The reciprocal relationship between perception and action, where perception guides action and action provides new perceptual information, leading to continuous learning and adaptation.

Preferential-Looking Tests

A method used to study infant perception where infants are presented with two or more stimuli, and researchers measure the amount of time the infant spends looking at each stimulus to infer preferences.

Habituation-Recovery Tests

A method used to study infant perception that involves repeatedly presenting a stimulus until the infant habituates (decreases attention) to it, then presenting a novel stimulus to see if the infant recovers (increases attention), indicating discrimination.

Contingent Reinforcement Studies

A method where infants learn to modify behaviors (like sucking or head-turning) to elicit specific stimuli (like mom's voice), following the principles of operant conditioning.

Visual Acuity

The clarity or sharpness of vision, which improves rapidly during the first months of infancy.

Contrast Sensitivity

The ability to detect differences in brightness between an image and its background, related to the physical maturity of the eye.

Visual Cliff Experiment

A classic experiment used to study depth perception in infants, involving a plexiglass-covered table with a 'shallow' side and a 'deep' side to assess avoidance of the 'cliff.'

Attractiveness Effect

The phenomenon that infants tend to look longer at faces that adults rate as attractive, potentially due to symmetry and the 'average' facial phenotype.

Perceptual Narrowing

A developmental process characterized by a diminished ability to distinguish among stimuli due to a lack of experience with them, often leading to specialization in processing familiar stimuli.

Intermodal Perception

The ability to integrate and connect information available through multiple senses simultaneously, such as vision and hearing.

Dynamic Systems Theory

A theory of motor development emphasizing the interaction between multiple systems (nervous, muscular, environmental) to produce behavior, rejecting the idea that development is solely driven by maturation.

Locomotion

The ability to move from one place to another, including rolling, crawling, cruising, and walking.

Prehension

The act of reaching for, grasping, and manipulating objects.