Whether infants were born with the ability to understand what they are seeing has been thoroughly researched by developmental psychologists. The ability of perception and whether infants learn through experience or whether it is an innate ability will be placed under scrutiny in this essay. The ideas of size and shape constancy, motion and binocular parallaxes in regards to depth perception are the main aspects that have been researched in order to determine a conclusion to this question at hand.
Within perception, there have been many key ideas as to what causes perception and whether it is innate. Batki, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Connellan and Ahluwalia (2000) focused on new-born children – particularly those aged less than 2 months old. Using a gaze study, they measured how long 2 month old infants looked at a photograph of a woman with her eyes open and her eyes closed. They found that the infants spent more time looking at a photograph with eyes open. From this, they concluded that infants have a preference for a face-like pattern and believed that this may be an innate mechanism within the brain that detects eye-like stimuli and, therefore, directs attention towards that stimulus. It has also been noted that babies from just one month old prefer a facial pattern (Fantz, 1961). Fogel and Melson (1988) gathered evidence that infants between the ages of four and eight weeks focused on the eyes of a photograph. This evidence seems to point towards an innate ability to focus and recognise faces – or at least, eyes. This points to babies being able to recognise and understands contours on a pattern to make up a facial feature that they can relate to.
Depth Perception has been highly rese...
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...etinal image size. Journal of Experimental Psychology.Human Perception & Performance, 32(6), 1398-1404. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.32.6.1398
Ni, R., Braunstein, M. L., & Andersen, G. J. (2005). Distance perception from motion parallax and ground contact. Visual Cognition, 12(6), 1235-1254. doi:10.1080/13506280444000724
Slater, A., Mattock, A. & Brown, E. (1990) Size constancy at birth: Newborn infants’ responses to retinal and real size. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 49, 314-322
Ueno, M., Uchiyama, I., Campos, J. J., Dahl, A., & Anderson, D. I. (2012). The organization of wariness of heights in experienced crawlers. Infancy, 17(4), 376-392. doi:10.1111/j.1532-7078.2011.00083.x
Walk, R. D., & Gibson, E. J. (1961). A comparative and analytical study of visual depth perception. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 75(15), 1-44. doi:10.1037/h0093827
Motion parallax gives females an estimate of the distance to display objects, yielding a size estimate that will conflict with illusory sixe estimates generated by forced-perspective and Ebbinghaus illusions.
...ere is a correlation between blindness and a delay to the development ToM. Whether it’s Xena or children with congenital profound visual impairment it’s obvious that visual cues are significant when trying to interpret the actions of others. Xena, like the children in the study, was forced to rely on other senses to compensate for the lack of visual cues, which is important because without them children are at a disadvantage to understanding the greater world around them.
The simple optical illusions used by Ariely show us just how easily our senses can lead our judgments to be distorted. The first illusion was an animation of Shepard’s Tables; an example of size-constancy expansion first published by Roger Shepard as “Turning the Tables”. We know the two tables are the same length but yet why does one table appear to be longer than the other? In this case it is because the angles suggest depth and perspective and the brain wrongly believes one table is longer and while the other in shorter. It is interesting that despite us knowing that the tables are in fact the same length, we still perceive them to be different lengths; despite us knowing the truth, we could not get our minds to see reality as it really is. In the second example, Ariely shows the ...
...search has provided a deeper understanding into the field of infant development. This study looked to see whether infants differentially process an adults’ eye gaze depending on directed or averted eye gaze from an object located in the infants’ periphery view. It was found that there are differences in neural processing between direct and averted eye gaze in terms of encoding and attention. However, improvements could be made to the study such as making changes to the face in order to see whether the perception of the face changes processing, as well as carrying out a memory test to verify the assumption made about encoding differences. Future research has focused on infants with Autism Spectrum Disorder in relation to the processing of eye gaze to determine whether autism can be identified early on in infancy (Hoehl, Reid, Parise, Handl, Palumbo, & Striano, 2009).
A common area of perception that many may not think about is the ability to recognize faces. Facial recognition, however, is not consistent from infancy to adulthood but develops throughout an individual’s life. During infancy, the ability to see detail is quite poor compared to the average adult (Goldstein & Brockmole, 2017). When objects are within close distances, studies have shown that infants are able to perceive and detect a few features of the object; this idea can then be related to facial recognition in infants (Goldstein & Brockmole, 2017). The details that infants are able to perceive are associated with contrast in light, especially the difference between dark and light areas. Though this does
This can be identified as the four stages of mental development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and the formal operational stage. (Cherry, 2017) Each stage involves a difference of making sense in reality than the previous stage. In the sensorimotor stage, the first stage, infants start to conduct an understanding of the world by relating sensory experiences to a motor or physical action. This stage typically lasts from birth until around two years of age. A key component of this stage is object permanence, which simply means to understand an object will exist even when it can’t be directly visualized, heard, or felt. The second stage was the preoperational stage. This stage dealt more so with symbolic thinking rather than senses and physical action. Usually, the preoperational stage last between two to seven years old, so you can think of this as preschool years. The thinking in infants is still egocentric or self-centered at this time and can’t take others perspectives. The third stage or the concrete operational stage averagely lasts from seven to eleven years of age. This is when individuals start using operations and replace intuitive reasoning with logical reasoning in concrete circumstances. For example, there are three glasses, glass A and B are wide and short and filled with water while glass C is tall and skinny and empty. If the water in B is
In this assignment I am going to describe a child observation that I have done in a nursery for twenty minutes in a play setting. I will explain the strengths and weaknesses of naturalistic observation through the key developmental milestones based in Mary Sheridan (2005) check-list and provide a theoretical explanation to support the naturalistic observation.
Baillargeon, R., & DeVos, J. (1991). Object permanence in 3.5 and 4.5-month-old infants: further evidence. Child Development, 62, 1227-1246.
Piaget’s theory suggests that, at eight weeks of age, a child is in a sensorimotor stage. This means their sensory and motor skills are kicking in and the child begins to suck, grasp, look around and reach. Dayc...
Visual awareness in humans can affect social interaction and knowledge formation. It has always been thought that adults possess better vision than children. In the past it was thought that babies were born without vision and gained it gradually. Most of these perceptions have so far been nullified by modern research. Although the above is untrue, there are still several differences between infants’ and adults’ vision. The eye of the infant is less than half the size of an adult’s. Considering that visual ability is related to eye size, in infan...
"Perception - Definition of Perception by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia." Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus - The Free Dictionary. Web. 08 Feb. 2011. .
This stage is divided into six substages are Simple Reflexes , Primary Circular Reactions , Secondary Circular Reactions , Coordination of Secondary Schemes , Tertiary Circular Reactions and Invention of New Means through Mental Combinations. These are described as : The first substage covers the first month after birth , it is dominating by the assimilation of sources of stimulation of inborn reflexes such as grasping or visual tracking (Rathus, S., & Longmuir, S., 2011 , p.81). The second substage is defined as primary circular reactions is focus on the infant’s own body rather than on the external environment . It lasts from about 1 to 4 (-in APA write out numbers under ten) month of age and is characterized by the beginning of the ability to coordinate various sensorimotor circular reaction(s). (space)In this (word missing) the infants focus changes from focusing on themselves to focusing on the external environments and this includes objects (Rathus, S., & Longmuir, S., 2011 , p.82) . During the fourth stage infants tends to imitate gestures and sounds that they had previously ignored and they also coordinates to attain a specific goals , for example trying to picking up the objects (Rathus, S., & Longmuir, S., 2011 ,
It was determined that infants develop color vision at or around three months of age and that when final results were evaluated and compared to adult (only) measures, actually have better quality color vision (Brown et al., 1994). An interesting study by Chase (1937) made efforts to discover the identities of color in which infants that aged 2 to 10 weeks old were tested to find out what colors they could perceive. The results they came up with were that very young infants could tell the difference between the primary colors and combinations but there were numerous limitations to the study (Chase, 1937). The study had placed infants to lie down and view a screen while observing eye movements (Chase, 1937). Findings by Franklin, Pilling, and Davies (2005) explain that color categorizing occurs in four month old infants and adults alike. A study by Bornstein, Kessen, & Weiskopf (1976) has supporting evidence that color is categorized in 4 month old infants and determined the boundaries within...
During the birth to two years stage children are learning about the world through their sensations and through their movements. One of the most influential theorist’s Jean Piaget developed four important stages of cognitive development. In the first stage, known as the sensorimotor stage, direct sensory experiences are occurring. Motor actions are occurring as well, which are important for the learning of children as they get older. Since infants at this age are learning through their movements they are using basic actions such as grasping onto objects with their hands, sucking, listening and observing the world around them. With these movements, they are beginning to understand that their actions cause things to happen around them. When this
Mental Representation: In this stage, the infant is able internally to depict an object, which is drawn in his problem-solving techniques. Besides that, the child can locate an object when out of sight. Hence, in this stage, the infant has great object permanence (Berk, 2013).