Lecture notes
Perceptual Development
- Institution
- Newcastle University (NCL)
Notes from the perceptual development part of the module
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Lecture 2 – Perceptual Development Why are faces important to infants?
o Nature v nurture
Psychologists interested whether perceptual abilities are predominantly inborn
or a product of learning
Nativists believe in humans being born with perceptual functions ready to be
used
Empiricists believe that perceptual abilities must be learnt and adapted to
Course focuses on visual and auditory perception
Even at a young age infants need to be able to perceive basic information form their
environment
o Visual analysis
o Depth
o Size
o Angles
o Constancies
o Motion
o Audition (instruction)
Explorations by an infant
o New-borns are passive
If a bright light comes on, they attend to it
Scanning movements seem inborn
o With age, infants become more active
Purposefully seeking sensory information around them
, Movement is an important contributor
Combining information
o Inter-sensory integration - infants begin to integrate information from several senses
E.g. watching an adult do actions whilst listening to nursery rhyme (auditory and
visual combination)
o Cross-modal transfer - infants can perceive something via one modality and transfer the
information to another modality
E.g. Meltzolf and Borton (1979)
Infants approx. 29 days old
2 dummies, one smooth the other bumpy. Visually presented with both
dummies
71% looked longer at dummy they were sucking
o Essential skills for successful development - e.g. language
o Difficulty integrating sensory information
Sensory Integration Dysfunction (SID)
Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD)
Hypersensitivity v hyposensitivity
Can lead sensory overload
Researcher challenges in studying perception
o Lack of infant linguistic abilities
o Concentration/attention
o Crying
o Sleeping
o Ethical and consensual access
Auditory perception
o Babies can hear before birth (De Casper et al, 1994)
o Basic auditory capabilities are relatively mature at birth (Lasky and Williams, 2005)
o At around 7-9 months begin to focus on individual sounds plus rhythm (language
development)
o Over the first year of life the greatest change in hearing is the ability to organise sounds
into complex patterns
o Methods of study:
Non-nutritive sucking (NNS)
Nazzi et al (1998) infant sucking rate indicates the ability to discriminate
between pitch contours
Brain responses (e.g. ERP)
Winkler et al (2003) similar to adults, new-born infants segregate
concurrent streams of sound, allowing them to organize auditory input.
o Precursor of language
Even the fetus can learn about the irregularities of language from the muffled
language they hear inside the womb (Moon et al, 1993)
Infants ages 2-7 months old listen longer to real speech sounds than to muddled
up rhythms (Vouloumanos and Werker, 2004)
NNS indicates that infants can discriminate between their native language and a
foreign language (Moon et al, 1987)
They suck more for their native language)
Year 1 is about structure and organisation of sound
Werker and Tees (1984)
Tested English learning infants between 6-12 months at the ability to
discriminate non-native speech contrasts (Hindi and Salish)
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