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Chapter 6Perception
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Methods of Studying Infant Perception

• Habituation Discrimination learning
• learning to be bored
• Preferential looking
• Study of visual acuity
• Evoked potentials recorded as child looks
• Operant conditioning
• R of one stimulus in a pair

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Vision

• Present at birth
• Detect changes in brightness
• Visually track moving objects
• By 4 months can discriminate colors
• Visual acuity at about 8 inches
• Prefer contour, contrast, movement
• Prefer complex over simple patterns
• Prefer human face over all

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Figure 6.1
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Vision 2

• Depth perception
• Newborns appear to have size constancy
• The visual cliff Gibson Walk (1960)
• A crawler (7 mo) will not cross the cliff
• Can perceive the cliff by 2 months
• Fear of drop-off requires crawling
• Infants as intuitive theorists able to make
  sense of the world

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Hearing and Speech

• Humans can hear well before birth
• Newborns discriminate sounds that differ in
  loudness, duration, direction, and pitch
• Two-3 month olds distinguish phonemes
• Eimas (1985) Ba Pa studies
• Newborns prefer female/mothers voice
• Lose sensitivity to sounds not needed for home
  language

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Taste and Smell

• Newborns can distinguish between sweet, bitter,
  and sour tastes
• Show a clear preference for sweet
• Facial expressions reflect taste
• Cry and turn away from unpleasant smells
• Breast-fed babies recognize mothers smell
• Mothers can identify their newborns by smell

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Touch, Temperature, and Pain

• Sense of touch( motion) before birth
• Useful for soothing a fussy baby
• At birth sensitivity to warm and cold
• Clearly sensitive to painful stimuli
• Do babies require anesthesia for surgery?
• More harm from stress of pain
• Recommended for circumcisions

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Integrating Sensory Information

• Vision touch, vision hearing are interrelated
  within the first month
• Cross-modal perception previously seen objects
  hidden a bag are identified by touch
• Very early perceptual abilities are evidence for
  Nature
• Sensory system requires stimulation to develop
  normally
• First 3-4 months considered critical

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The development of Attention

• From infancy on
• Attention span increases
• More able to concentrate on a task
• Attention becomes more selective
• Able to ignore distractions
• More systematic perceptual searches
• To achieve goals solve problems

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The Adult

• Sensory and perceptual capacities decline
• May begin in early adulthood
• Noticeable in the 40s
• Typical by age 65
• Gradual and minor in the normal person
• Compensation gradually increases
• Sensory threshold point at which the least
  amount of a stimulus can be detected
• Increases with age

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Sensory/Perceptual Problems

• Vision by age 70 9/10 wear corrective lenses
• 1 in 4 will have cataracts
• Pupil less responsive to light
• Dim lighting is problematic
• Dark and glare adaptation difficult
• Presbyopia Middle age glasses
• thickening of the lens
• Peripheral vision declines

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Hearing/Speech in Older Adults

• Most have at least mild hearing loss
• Presbycusis loss of high-pitched sounds
• More common and earlier in men
• Some difficulty with speech perception
• May be cognitive or sensory
• Background noise a problem
• Novel and complex tasks problematic

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Other Senses in Older Adults

• Over 70 taste and smell thresholds increase
• Many are not affected at all mostly men
• Also affected by disease and medications
• Loss of enjoyment of food may cause malnutrition
  in older adults
• Less sensitive to touch and temperature
• Less sensitive to mild but not sever pain