Chapter 5 (7): Sensation, Perception, and Learning

• Sensation: external information experienced through sensory organs
• Perception: interpretation of sensation
• Empiricists: the nurture people, children learn via sensation
• Nativists: the Nature people, preception abilities are innate
• Empiricist: William James
• Nativists: Rene descartes, Immanuel Kant
• Enrichment Theory: created by piaget, suggests that we create schemes (shortcuts) that make sense of senses (dogs have four legs, but so do cats)
• Differentiation: Created by Gibson, he suggests that sensory information can be interpreted on its own. Children learn to detect distinct feature (Dogs bark, and cats meow)
• Preference Method: created by Fantz, two stimuli are presented and the child attention is measured
• Habituation Method: Stimulus is presented repeatedly until the infant response changes
• Discrimination Ability: tests by presenting second stimulus and observing the response
• High-amplitude sucking methods: Pacifier measures sucking of the child
• Evoked potentials methods: records brain electrical activity, and changes as different stimulus is presented
• MEG (brain imaging): identifies when and where brain electrical activity occurs in response to stimuli, more details and more $$$
• fMRI (brain imaging): identifies where brain activity occurs when at rest and also when it is active
• Hearing: is more developed at birth and newborns can recognize maternal voices
• Phoneme: basic level of speech, newborns can discriminate
• Otitis Media: inflammation of the middle ear, usually caused by a virus
• Taste and Smell: newborn has taste preferences, can react to stink, and can recognize the smell of their mom
• Touch, temperature, and pain: Newborns are sensitive to temp. and pain, highly tactile
• Visual Acuity: 20/600 and gets to normal level by 12 months
• Binocular: both eyes input and understanding in the world around us
• Size Constancy: objects staying the same size despite distance, present at birth
• Visual Cliff: used for understanding child growth
• Intermodal Perception: using multiple senses together to identify. Identifying a golf ball by touch only
• Young children are constantly learning from the environment, and eventually can make good guesses due to experience
• three features of Learning: thinking, perceiving, and reacting to environment in a new way, change happens due to experiences, and changes are semi-permanent
• Habituation: decreases of response to a stimulus, improves in the first years of life
• faster habituation usually means quicker learning
• Classical Conditioning: Learning through association between two stimuli that are paired together
• Operant Conditioning: learning that reinforcement and punishment
• Classical Conditioning works in newborns only if there is a programed reflex like sucking
• Operent Conditioning: example - Messing with the temp dials, due to your dad getting angry
• Even babies can learn from Operant conditioning
• Imatation: learning while watching someones behaviours
• Observational Learning: children learn via others behavior