Exam 6: Perceptual Development in Infancy

Company XY wants to design a new video show that will capture the attention of young infants, and asks for your advice as a consultant. To capture infants' attention you suggest that the company uses:

Three sources of depth cues used by infants are

Perceiving "illusionary" edges when no edges are present is referred to as

In her dissertation, Dr Jones habituated babies a shade of blue near the boundary between blue and green. Following habituation, infants were shown two novel colors that differed from the habituation stimulus by identical physical amounts but one was a light green, the other a light blue (equal in luminance). Infants showed a strong preference for the light green stimulus - suggesting infants considered this stimulus more novel than the light blue stimulus. This provides evidence for:

Dr Smith wants to study infants' sensitivity to biological movements. What kinds of stimuli could she use in her work to avoid contextual confounds?

In your textbook it states that "infants are mute and motorically underdeveloped". While this statement may not be strictly true, infants' lack of language and limited motor skills raise challenges for research with infants. Briefly describe some ways to learn about infants' perception and abilities

What kind of problem will Dr Williams face when attempting to study infants' ability to discriminate between different colors?

Visual acuity refers to our ability to perceive fine detail. Remember what you have learned about visual acuity development during infancy and combine this knowledge with what you know about the development of gaze following. Imagine you are a scientist wanting to study the relation between visual acuity and gaze following: what hypothesis would you make about such a relation, and why?

Infants have access to three kinds of cues to perceive depth in visual space. Name at least two broad categories and give a brief example for each.

How infants distribute their attention is important because

In the moving room apparatus, walls and ceiling can be moved to create the impression of optic flow. Dr Jones observes two infants in the moving room. The first has been crawling for one month already and leaned forward and nearly fell in response to the optic flow cues of the moving room. The second infant is not crawling yet and remained in a stable sitting position while in the moving room. From these observations, Dr Jones may conclude that:

Infants changing the aperture of their hand to adjust to the size of an object before making contact is an example of

Mrs Jones is worried about her 1-month-old daughter Mary's visual acuity. How would you assess Mary's visual acuity?

What is child-directed speech? Why is it of interest to infant researchers, and how do infants respond to child-directed speech?

Attentional inertia refers to:

Do the results of studies on infants' face perception skills favor a nature or a nurture perspective?

Which of the following is not a characteristic of child-directed speech?

In the experiment of Kellman and Spelke (1983), the presence or absence of congruent movement of the two rod pieces significantly changed the results, suggesting that:

Your test with Mary from question 8 reveals that she has poor visual acuity. Should Mrs. Jones be concerned about these results?

You discover a scientific equalizer on your MP3 player. It has separate controls for sound frequency and sound amplitude. What will happen when you adjust the setting for frequency?