Lecture 2: Perceptual Narrowing
Developmentalists’ goals
Describe: What is
perceptual narrowing?
General Timeline
What path does
“narrowing” follow?
Maurer & Werker, 2013
Perceptual narrowing for
Language Ted Talk
● Developmentalists’ goals are to:
a. Describe
■ What is perceptual narrowing? What is
the timeline?
b. Explain
■ How does it unfold this way?
c. Optimize
■ What recommendations would we give
parents?
● Perceptual systems moving from general to specific
with experience
○ Experience is the driver of that
● This happens with phoneme perception (language),
face perception, vocal identity, musical rhythms, and
in other categories
● What does that mean? Babies start as “citizens of the
world” but become “culture-bound perceivers”
● ….
● The language is happening a bit sooner than the face
stuff but everything is more general
● Cross race perception specia;lization happens a bit
before the cross ….
● Assumption is that infants do not have any ability to
discriminate
● The attunement theory is supported by the evidence
○ The things that they get exposed to, facilitates
their
○ If they do not get exposed to iot, then you will
not be able to discriminate those things
○ ….
● Language has a critical period for learning
● Baby sits on a parent’s lap and they are trained to turn
their head when there is change in sound
● Babies can discriminate all the sounds that they listen
● At 6-8 months the babies are equivalent
● The babies are listening to us intently and they are
taking statistics
Effects of training: ● THe researcher can present babies with a stream of
Reduced plasticity with different speech sounds … or you
age ● These are spanish listening babies
● If you do this for 2-4 minutes
○ 6-8 months: very brief exposure leads to
better discrimination
■ They are already better to discriminate
than
○ 10 months: twice as much exposure needed
■ They can get better bu they need twice
as much exposure than the younger
babies
○ 18 months and adulthood: Training not very
effective
● Plasticity is … but there is already a lost of plasticity

Perceptual Narrowing for ● Faces

Identifying Individuals ○ Race
○ Species
○ Age
● Voices
○ Species
● Methods to see if the baby
● Visual paired comparison procedure… by making one
pair new????
● Younger babies
● Adults are better at discriminating adult faces than
seeing infant faces

Effects of training: Must ● Can we train a baby past the 6 month mark but not
highlight individuals quite the 12 month mark
(Scott & Monesson, 2009) ● Storybooks read by parents and did this for 10 mins
every day first 2 weeks, 3rd week in every other day,
4th week every 2 day and so on
● Exposed to it for 3 months from 6 months to 9
months
● The story book had a bunch of monkeys
● If babies in individual category, the monkeys were
given names
● If babies in category level, they monkeys or every
monkey is called monkey
● If the babies are in the exposure level, they were not
given any particular label but they were still exposed
to the pictures
● At 9 months, the babies in the individual training
● After training, only
●
Concept Check 1 4-month-old Grogu is a Caucasian baby only exposed to
English. Can he tell apart two Chinese faces? Can he tell
apart two speech sounds used in Hindi but not English?
A. No, but he will be able to tell these apart when he is
6-months-old
B. Yes, but sometime before he turns 1 he will lose
these abilities
C. He can tell apart the CHinese faces, but not the Hindi
speech
D. He can tell apart the Hindi speech sounds, but not the
Chinese faces

Questions to ponder ● Could similar mechanisms be driving perceptual

narrowing for language, identifying individuals via
face/voice. Etc.?
● What could these mechanisms be?

Explain: Any relationship ● Krasotkina et al., 2018

between narrowing across ● 9-month Caucasian German infants tests on
domains? non-native Cantonese speech tones and
same-race/other-race (Chinese) faces
○ They might be more narrow than others
● They tested them on identifying some cantonese
phonemes
● They used habituation method to do that
● As expected,the infants were able to discriminate
● At 9 months they were not performing very well in
differentiating from
● Higher score means that they are better at
differentiating cantonese speech sounds
● This is correlated
● That implies that these things are related

Synaptic Pruning? ● Initial hyperconnectivity in infancy

 ● Stimulated connections strengthened, unused
connections pruned away
● Evidence
○ Less narrowing in adult synesthetes
■ Synesthesia is the experience of
percepts paired together. Some people
experience pairings
■ Adult synesthetes
○ Premature infants
■ We have to consider gestation stage if
narrowing is all about exposure
■ What we see with premature babies
the timeline of narrowing is more
aligned with their gestation stage than
to their birth stage

Stricti Maturational ● Sugita (2007)

Timeline or Experience ● Experience expectant input vs. experience dependent
based? ○ Our brain is expecting something to happen vs
brain related changes changes
● Reared infant monkeys from birth with no exposure
to either human or monkey faces for 6, 12, or 24
months
● After deprivation, exposed to either human or
monkey (IV) for one month
○ There was no effect on the narrowing
procedure

Optimize: Evidence-based ● What should parents do if they want their child to

recommendations? learn more than one language?
● Could early perceptual biases be related to later
implicit biases against out-group members?

Neighbourhood racial ● By 6 months of age, infants preferentially orient to

demographics predict people from their own racial or linguistic group
infants’ neural responses (ingroup) compared to people from different groups
(Hwang et al., 2020) (outgroup)
● By 9 months, infants start to show difficulty
individuating racial outgroup faces
○ This is known as the other-race effect
● This perceptual narrowing appears to shape infants’
category formation such that infants consider faces
from races they are unfamiliar with as one category of
“other race” rather than making a more fine-grained
distinction
○ White 9-month-old infants appear to vie Black
and Asian faces as one category
● White infants from more racially diverse
neighbourhoods exhibited greater frontal theta
 oscillation (an index of top-down attention) and more
mu rhythm desynchronization (an index of motor
system activation and potentially neural mirroring) to
racial outgroup individuals than white infants from
less racially diverse neighbourhoods
● Neighbourhood racial demographics did not relate to
white infants’ frontal alpha asymmetry (a measure of
approach-withdrawal motivation) towards racial
outgroup individuals
● Racial minority infants showed no effects of
neighbourhood racial demographics in their neural
responses to racial outgroup individuals
● These results indicate that neural mechanisms that
may underlie social bias and prejudices are related to
neighbourhood racial demographics in the first year
of life
● Methods
○

Concept Check Caucasian baby Grogu is growing up in Scarborough, in

a very diverse neighbourhood. At the grocery store with
his mom, he watches a South Asian woman pick up a box
of chicken nuggets. According to the study we read by
Hwang, what might be going on in Grogu’s brain?
A. His own motor system will be activated
B. Power in top-down attention centres will reduce
C. Approach-withdrawal centres will be activated
D. All of the above

Questions to ponder 1. Is “narrowing” a good or a bad thing?

2. What advice can we give to parents?\

Summary ● Especially for socially meaningful stimuli, infants

start with broad discriminatory abilities. This is
followed by loss in ability for non-native contrasts
and a maintenance or specialization for native
contrasts.
● Training prevents “loss”, but plasticity reduces with
age
● Synaptic pruning may one mechanism related to this
process
● There is evidence that the process is
experience-dependent