Cards (13)

    • Development begins from the moment of conception
    • Brain begins to develop very early in the embryonic period and continues to develop through infancy
    • Genetic and environmental factors interact to affect development in the prenatal period (continues after birth)
    • Experiences can turn genes on or off and vice versa, genes can limit or influence the impact of experiences
    • Infants are capable of cognition and the analysis of information beyond the stage of mere sensory-perceptual encoding
    • Argument against Piaget’s theory of infants’ perception of objects = children born without hands or legs following the thalidomide tragedy:
      • Babies showed normal intellectual development despite no opportunity for physical interaction with objects (DeCarie, 1969)
      • Couldn’t hold and look at things simultaneously, which is essential in Piaget’s theory (touch tutors vision)
    • Infants have a precocious understanding of essential object properties such as solidity:
      • Bower (1971) study showed babies perceived a 'virtual object' as solid by projecting a polarised light shadow of a stationary cube
      • Change in heart rate indicated surprise when their hands swiped through it
      • Three-month-old babies were "surprised" when an object disappeared instantaneously
      • Meltzoff and Borton (1979) found that young babies can extract basic info about objects they touched but not seen
      • Baillargeon (1999) used the habituation method to show infants perceive the continued existence of hidden objects and understand physical interactions between objects
    • Visual preferences in infancy demonstrated by Fantz (1961), showing a preference for patterned objects
      • Baillargeon (1991) found babies perceive objects' continued existence and physical size when occluded
      • Hespos & Baillargeon (2001) showed infants' surprise when a tall object disappeared behind a short container
      • Smith (1999) suggests a dynamic, epigenetic approach to development resolves nativist-empiricist conflict
      • Spelke (1999) suggests basic knowledge structures may be present in perceptual systems
    • Infants struggle with coordinating actions and memory, particularly in tasks like retrieving hidden objects
      • Stage IV error involves persistently searching for an object in its initial hiding place despite it being moved elsewhere
      • Diamond (1988) found a delay of about three seconds between hiding and retrieval is necessary for infants at eight months to make this error
      • Wellman, Cross, and Bartsch (1986) identified factors influencing error likelihood
    • Reaching and grasping:
      • Piaget (1945/1962) believed hand movement and vision are independent, with a hand regard period at 3 months old
      • White, Castle, and Held (1964) supported the acceleration of reaching through brightly colored mittens
      • Bower (1982) argued the link between visual and hand movement isn't established by visual feedback
      • Fraiberg (1974) observed reaching in blind babies substituting audition for vision
      • Bruner (1983) noted infants struggle to establish correct serial order between acts for reaching and grasping
      • Contemporary research suggests eye-hand coordination is innate
      • Jeannerod (1984) described the innate transportation component of reaching coordinated with a manipulation component guided by the visual properties of the object
    • Hierarchical integration involves the use of memory to deal with three objects at a time, storing the third object elsewhere instead of dropping it