Week 5 LEcture Slides

Overview of Psychology Across the Lifespan

• Course Code: 10445

• Focus: Perception, Knowledge, and Action

• Learning Objectives:

  • Describe sensation and perception

  • Understand techniques to assess sensory-perceptual and memory capabilities in infants

  • Explore the development of sensory capabilities in infants (vision, audition, smell, touch)

Key Definitions

Sensation and Perception

• Sensation: Process by which sensory organs pick up information from the environment and transmit it to the brain for initial processing.

• Perception: Process by which the brain organizes, interprets, recognizes, and identifies sensations.

Theoretical Positions

• Nativist Position: Infants are born capable of perceiving forms and patterns.

• Empiricist Position: Infants develop perception through experience.

• Ethologist/Gibsonian Position: Environment is rich in information that guides perception.

• Cognitive Position ('Top-Down' Approach): Thought processes influence perception.

Methods for Assessing Infant Sensory-Perceptual Abilities

• Behavioural observation

• Habituation-dishabituation

• Preferential looking

• Imitation

• Operant conditioning

• Evoked potential

Development of Vision in Infants

Visual Acuity

• Definition: Clarity or precision of vision.

• Newborn Vision: 40 times worse than adults; roughly 20/120 vision at one month.

• Development Timeline:

  • 3 months: 6/30 vision

  • 12 months: similar to adults

Colour Vision and Pattern Perception

• At 3 months, infants can distinguish colors and categorize them into hues.

• Infants develop complexity in visual preferences:

  • Attention to light-dark transitions, movements, and edges.

Preferential Looking Results

• Increases in eye contact and looking at faces develop social bonds.

Object Perception

Constancies

• Object Constancy: Perception remains stable despite changes in viewpoint (size, shape).

Depth Perception

• Newborns can perceive depth differences, improving coordination by 4-5 months.

Visual Cliff Experiment (Gibson & Walk, 1960)

• Evaluated infants' depth perception with a visual cliff apparatus.

• Findings: Infants preferred the shallow side, indicating their recognition of depth.

Development of Hearing in Infants

Detection of Sounds

• Infants require louder sounds (10-17 decibels higher than adults) to detect sound.

• Sensitivity to high-frequency sounds begins by 2 months.

• Newborns can differentiate the mother's voice from others from a very young age.

Intermodal Perception

• Ability to combine different sensations into a single perception.

Early Memory Ability

Recall

• Rovee-Collier & Cuevas (2009): Infants demonstrate recall for tasks, with older infants showing improved memory retention.

Object Permanence

• Piaget's view: Infants don't develop object permanence until after 9 months.

Mathematical Understanding in Infants

Number Discrimination

• Infants can discriminate small numbers; difficulty with larger numbers.

Addition and Subtraction

• Wynn (1992) demonstrated that 6-month-old infants show surprise at incorrect arithmetic outcomes, indicating basic numerical understanding.