Deck 6: Perceptual Development in Infancy

Question 1

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.

Answer 1

Binocular depth cues - convergence of eyes to determine distance of object
Monocular (pictorial) depth cues - relative size, linear perspective, texture gradients, interposition, shading
Kinetic depth cues - looking/expansion, motion parallax, accretion-deletion of texture

Question 2

Starting at birth, newborns actively seek out and attend to certain aspects of their environment. For example, newborns have been shown to preferentially look at faces or face-like images. What do these patterns of attention suggest about infants' attention abilities?

Answer 2

Infants are not just passive registrants of experiences but actively select and filter features of their environment. As such, infants are shaping their own learning

Question 3

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

Answer 3

Child-directed speech is a specific pattern of speech used by adults to talk to children. It is nearly universal across cultures and involves speaking with higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, and a sing-song rhythm. It is preferred by infants and elicits more attention (even if in non-native language).

Question 4

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

Question 5

Why were philosophers interested in perceptual development during infancy?

A) Infancy provides a starting point against which maturation and the effects of experience can be assessed.
B) Origins of behaviors should be discussed near the beginning of life.
C) The question whether infants enter the world with some rudimentary knowledge was of key interest.
D) All of the above.

Question 6

Studying perceptual development in young infants or newborns allows scientists to

A) Determine whether a skill is innate or learned.
B) Estimate the earliest age a certain behavior may be elicited.
C) Prove that some skills are not learned.
D) Prove that there are no innate abilities.

Question 7

Three sources of depth cues used by infants are

A) Object expansion, relative size, binocular convergence.
B) Monocular convergence, linear perspective, interpolation.
C) Shading, brightness, and hue.
D) None of the above.

Question 8

How infants distribute their attention is important because

A) Attention determines what information enters the brain.
B) Attention has social consequences.
C) Attention is important for successful gaze-following behaviors.
D) All of the above.

Question 9

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:

A) Still photographs of interesting infant toys.
B) Displays of scrambled point-light walkers.
C) Images and videos with high complexity, contrast, and motion.
D) Repeated presentation of the same image, separated by brief blank screens.

Question 10

Attentional inertia refers to:

A) Infants' ability to flexibly move and disengage attention.
B) A shorter attention span in infants.
C) A longer attention span in infants.
D) Prolonged engagement with a stimulus.

Question 11

Dr Smith studies infants' attention using heart rate. Which of the following responses are characteristic for infants' heart rate during a habituation study?

A) Heart rate deceleration during sustained attention and acceleration during attention termination.
B) Successive increases in heart rate by 5 bpm with each habituation trial.
C) Successive decreases in hear rate by 5 bpm with each habituation trial.
D) None of the above.

Question 12

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

A) By showing Mary images of upright and rotated faces and noting her preference.
B) By showing Mary a gray screen and a screen with black and white stripes and noting her preference.
C) By recording Mary's eye gaze while looking at simple shapes such as a triangle.
D) By recording Mary's heart rate in response to viewing high-contrast images such as a checkerboard.

Question 13

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

A) Yes, because visual acuity develops rapidly in the first days of life and is expected to reach adult levels within 4-6 weeks.
B) Yes, because poor visual acuity could be a sign of neurological problems and may require further testing.
C) No, because visual acuity is poor at birth and improves rapidly over the first months of life.
D) No, because good visual acuity is not necessary for healthy perceptual development.

Question 14

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

A) Subjective contours.
B) Form perception.
C) Shape constancy.
D) Object permanence.

Question 15

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

A) Nature, because newborns seem to have innate knowledge about faces.
B) Nurture, because face processing skills improve with experience.
C) Neither, because both a and b are true.
D) Neither, because neither a nor b is true.

Question 16

Solid objects do not change size or shape, but our retinal image of these objects changes depending on our viewing distance or angle. Being able to recognize an object across different perspectives is referred to as:

A) Illusionary contours.
B) Good gestalt.
C) Good continuation.
D) Viewpoint invariance.

Question 17

With sufficient distance cues present, an observer will perceive an object to be of the same size regardless of its distance from the observer. This phenomenon is called:

A) Size constancy.
B) Shape constancy.
C) Size invariance.
D) Shape invariance.

Question 18

Kellman and Spelke (1983) showed 4-month-old infants a display of a rod, partially occluded behind a box. What was the purpose of this experiment?

A) To determine whether infants would preferentially gaze at edges of objects.
B) To determine if infants would perceive the occluded rod as one piece or two pieces.
C) To determine if infants would perceive subjective contours of the rod.
D) To determine if infants would show viewpoint invariance.

Question 19

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:

A) Motion can provide a cue for object unity.
B) Motion can provide cues for edge detection.
C) Movement can provide cues for subjective contours.
D) Movement can provide cues for viewpoint invariance.

Question 20

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

A) Stick-walker displays.
B) Stop-motion displays.
C) Point-light displays.
D) Swarm displays.

Question 21

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

A) Hue and luminance vary at the same time and the infant could use either during discrimination.
B) Infants cannot yet perceive hue.
C) Infants will not detect hue differences above the discrimination threshold.
D) Hue and brightness are inversely correlated.

Question 22

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:

A) Categorical perception of color.
B) Rapid development of color preferences.
C) Color perception that differs from that of adults.
D) Quantitative differences between colors.

Question 23

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?

A) Sound intensity will change from low to high.
B) Sound volume will change from low to high.
C) Sound pitch will change from low to high.
D) All of the above.

Question 24

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

A) Exaggerated intonation.
B) Repetition.
C) Sing-song rhythm.
D) Lower pitch.

Question 25

Infants recognizing their own leg movements over leg movements of another child provide an example of

A) Visual-spatial synchrony.
B) Visual-proprioceptive integration.
C) Categorical perception.
D) Perception-action coupling.

Question 26

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

A) Adjusting actions based on perceptual information.
B) Anticipation.
C) Grasp preparation.
D) All of the above.

Question 27

Providing pre-reaching infants with "sticky" mittens leads to an enhanced understanding of the interactions people have with objects. This is an example of

A) Changes in perception due to action experiences.
B) Changes in action due to perceptual experiences.
C) Visual-motor integration.
D) None of the above.

Question 28

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:

A) Locomotor experiences have no affect on infant's perception.
B) Locomotor experiences influence sensitivity to optic flow.
C) Perceptual systems are tuned by newly emerging motor skills.
D) Both b and c are true.

Question 29

American infants show a strong preference for music showing Western meter (2:1) which is common in American music over Balkan meter (3:2) which is uncommon. Turkish infants do not show such a preference and both meters are common in Turkey. This is an example of:

A) Innate preferences.
B) Preferences being shaped by experiences.
C) Selective attention.
D) Perceptual narrowing.

Question 30

The Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis postulates that multimodal information is important early in life. Briefly discuss the components of this hypothesis and what it postulates about multimodal events.

Question 31

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?

Question 32

In the kitten carousel study by Held and Hein (1963), two kittens were initially deprived of visual input until they could locomote and then received identical visual stimulation in a carousel apparatus. Critically, one kitten was "active" and allowed to move about on its own, while the second kitten was "passive" and pulled around the carousel by the first kitten. What were the key findings of this study, and how do they relate to what you have learned about perceptual development in infants?