L5 Sensation, Perception and action

• Sensation: Vision

   

  Sensation: vision

  • have a preference for visual information. 
  • They do not have great vision however, with newborns having acuity of 1 compared to 30 cyc/deg of an adult.
  • At 1 month infants focus on the hairline of a picture of a face, however at 3 months they look at internal features e.g. eyes and mouth, showing development.
  • Born legally blind but reach adult levels by 6 months
• Sensation: hearing

  • Babies shown to discriminate between Dutch and Japanese sentences with increased sucking on a pacifier after the change showing interest.
  • They can pick up prosody – Cat in the hat experiment (DeCasper & Spence)
  • Reach adult level at 5-8 years
• Sensation: taste and smell

  • Preferences for sweetness in study
  • Prefer smell of own mother – lactation study
  • Learn taste preference from mothers
• Sensation: taste and smell

  • Preferences for sweetness in study
  • Prefer smell of own mother – lactation study
  • Learn taste preference from mothers
• Perception

  • Perceptual constancy -  the tendency of animals and humans to see familiar objects as having standard shape, size, colour
  • Subjective contours – infants are able to recognise them according to a study.
  • Studies show infants prefer a soundtrack synched to a movie rather than un-synched. This reveals a sensitivity to audiovisual correspondence and cross-modal perception.
• Action

   

  Reflexes: grasp reflex, rooting and sucking. They do not require control.

   

  Perception and action combined: The Visual Cliff Study. Early crawlers and precrawlers given walkers avoided heights – they had chance to move around the world and create representations of the world. Whereas infants who had casts had delayed fears of heights.