INFANCY : SENSATION,

PERCEPTION AND LEARNING

APBD 1203
CHILD PSYCHOLOGY
The Newborn – What
abilities do brand new
babies have?
A Babies First 3 Months
 Babies are Amazing!
1. They are Not Tabula Rasa
2. Strong and Prepared to thrive
3. However…they are frustrated that we
don’t speak their language!

 Crying
Wolf (1969) found 18 distinct cries in
infants.
Examples:
- Food Cry
- Mad Cry
- Pain Cry
Babies end up conditioning their mothers
to their cries.

Copyright – Dr. Andrew J. Campbell ©2005 - 2009

 The First 3 Months Continued…
 Soothing the crying infant
- singing
- swaddling
- heartbeat
- familiar smell

 Sleeping: Necessary for Brain Development

- Infants can sleep up to 16 hours a day
- Mostly done in 2-3 hour naps
- Waking = crying or quiet alertness
- Sleep disturbances are common
(why? – Because they want to know what’s happening!)
 Infant Abilities
Infants are born with immature visual
system
can detect movement and large objects
Other senses function well on day 1
will orient to sounds
turn away from unpleasant odors
prefer sweet to sour tastes
Born with a number of reflex behaviors
 Infant Reflexes
Rooting—turning the head and
opening the mouth in the direction of a
touch on the cheek
Sucking—sucking rhythmically in
response to oral stimulation
Babinski—fanning and curling toes
when foot is stroked
 Infant Reflexes
Moro—throwing the arms out, arching the back and
bringing the arms together as if to hold onto something
(in response to loud noise or sudden change in position of
the head)
Grasping—curling the fingers around an object
 Sample Reflexes

Automatic sucking object

Sucking reflex placed in newborn’s mouth
Reaction when infant’s cheek is
Rooting reflex stroked or side of mouth touched
Startle response in reaction to
Moro reflex sudden, intense noise or movement
Occurs when something touches
Grasping reflex infant’s palms; infant response
is to grasp tightly
Sleep
 Infants sleep about 17 hours or more a day

 Regular and ample sleep correlates with normal brain

maturation, learning, emotional regulation, and psychological
adjustment in school and within the family
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 Sleep
Over the first month the amount of time spent in each type
or stage of sleep changes
Newborns dream a lot, or at least they have a high
proportion of “REM sleep”

REM sleep
rapid eye movement sleep is a stage of sleep characterized
by flickering eyes behind closed lids, dreaming, and rapid
brain waves

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 Sleep
 Sleep Patterns can be…
affected by birth order
first born typically receive more attention
diet
parents might respond to predawn cries with food, and/or
play (babies learn to wake up night after night)
child-rearing practices
“Where should infants sleep?”
 co-sleeping or bed-sharing
brain maturation

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INFANT’S SENSORY AND
PERCEPTUAL CAPACITIES
 Sensation and Perception
Sensation: Refers to the processing of basic
information from the external world by the sensory
receptors in the sense organs and brain
Perception: The process of organizing and
interpreting sensory
information about
the objects, events,
and spatial layout
of our surrounding
world
 Studying Visual Perception
Preferential-looking technique: Involves showing infants two
patterns or two objects at a time to see if the infants have a
preference for one over the other
Habituation:
Involves repeatedly
presenting an infant
with a given stimulus
until the response
declines
If the infant’s response
increases when a novel
stimulus is presented, the researcher infers that the baby can
discriminate between the old and new stimuli
 Visual Acuity
The sharpness of infants’ visual discrimination develops
so rapidly that it approaches that of adults by age 8
months and reaches full adult acuity by 6 years of age

An infant’s visual acuity can be estimated by comparing

how long the
baby looks at a striped
pattern such as this one
versus a plain gray
square of the same size
and overall brightness
 Visual Acuity
Young infants prefer to look at patterns of
high visual contrast because they have poor contrast
sensitivity (the ability to detect differences in light
and dark areas)
This is because the cones of the eye, which are concentrated
in the fovea (the central region of the retina) differ from
adults’ in size, shape, and spacing
In addition, very young infants have limited color
vision, although by 2-3 months of age their color
vision is similar to that of adults’
 Scanning and Tracking

Scanning
One-month-olds (a)
scan the perimeters
of shapes
Two-month-olds (b)
scan both the
perimeters and the
interiors of shapes
Tracking
Although infants begin scanning the environment right away,
they cannot track even slowly moving objects smoothly until 2
to 3 months of age
 Faces
From birth, infants are drawn to
faces because of a general bias
toward configurations with more
elements in the upper half than in
the lower half
From paying attention to real
faces, the infant comes to
recognize and prefer his or her
own mother’s face after about
only 12 cumulative hours of
exposure
Faces
With experience, infants not only
develop a preference for the type of
face they see most often, but also come
to understand the significance of
different facial expressions
From birth onward, infants look longer
at faces that adults find more attractive
than those adults rate as less attractive,
and interact more positively with
people with attractive faces
 Pattern Perception
Two-month-old infants can analyze and integrate
separate elements of a visual display into a coherent
pattern

When you look at this figure, you

no doubt see a square—what is
called a subjective contour,
because it does not actually exist

Seven-month-olds also see the

overall pattern here and detect the illusory square

Infants are also able to perceive coherence among

moving elements
 Perceptual Constancy
 The perception of objects as being
of constant size, shape, color, etc.,
in spite of physical differences in
the retinal image of the object
 If an infant looks at the larger,
but farther away cube,
researchers will conclude the
child has size constancy
 Supporting the nativist position,
visual experience does not seem to
be necessary for perceptual
constancy
 Object Segregation
The identification of separate
objects in a visual array
 Two-month-old infants use common
movement to perceive object segregation
 Older infants, like adults, use additional
sources of information for object
segregation, including their general
knowledge about the world
 In figure (a), for example, it is impossible to
know for sure whether what you see here is
one object or two
 Because of your knowledge about gravity
and support, you can be sure that figure (b)
is a single, albeit very odd, object
 Object Segregation
 Infants who see the display in figure (a)
perceive it as two separate objects, a rod
moving behind a block
 After habituating to the display, they look
longer at two rod segments than at a single
rod (b), indicating that they find the single
rod familiar but the two segments novel
 If they first see a display with no movement,
they look equally long at the two test
displays
 This result reveals the importance of
movement for object segregation
 Depth Perception
 Infants as young as 1 month
respond to optical expansion, a
depth cue in which an object
occludes increasingly more of the
background, indicating that the
object is approaching
 Stereopsis, the process by which
the visual cortex combines the
differing neural signals caused by
binocular disparity (the slightly
different signals sent to the brain
by the two eyes), emerges
suddenly at around 4 months of
age
Depth Perception
At about 6–7 months of
age, infants become
sensitive to a variety of
monocular or pictorial
cues, the perceptual cues
of depth that can be
achieved by one eye
alone
These include relative
size and interposition
 Depth Perception
This 7-month-old infant is using the monocular depth cue
of relative size
Wearing an eye patch to take away binocular depth information,
he is reaching to the longer side of a trapezoidal window
This behavior
indicates that the
baby sees it as
the nearer, and
hence more
readily reachable,
side of a regular
window
 Auditory Perception
Although the human auditory
system is relatively well
developed at birth, hearing does
not approach adult levels until age
5 or 6
Newborns turn toward sounds, a
phenomenon referred to as auditory
localization
Infants are remarkably proficient in
perceiving subtle differences in
human speech
 Perception of Music
Recent research evidence suggests a biological
foundation for music perception
Infants share the strong preferences adults have for some
music sounds over others
Infants also respond to rhythm in music and are sensitive
to melody, showing habituation to the same tune regardless
of pitch
Sensitivity to Taste and Smell
Develops before birth
Newborns prefer the smell of
breast milk and by two weeks
of age appear to be able to
differentiate the scent of their
own mothers from that of
other women
 Touch Perception
Infants learn about the
environment through
active touch
Oral exploration dominates
for the first few months
Around 4 months of age,
infants gain greater control
over their hand and arm
movements, and manual
exploration gradually takes
precedence over oral
exploration

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 Infants’ Visual Perception
Visual Acuity 20/600 at birth, near adult levels
by 1 year

Color Sees green and red at birth, all

colors by 2 months

Perceiving Patterns Prefer patterns at birth; face

scanning improves by 2 months
Depth Perception Developed by 7-8 months

Visual Begins by 4 months;

Expectations expect gravity by 6-8 months
 Intermodal Perception

 Ability to relate and integrate information about two or more

sensory modalities, such as vision and hearing
 Exists in newborns
 The combining of information from two or more senses is
present from very early in life
 Very young infants link sight and sound, oral and visual
experience, and visual and tactile experience
When two videos are presented simultaneously, 4-month-old
infants prefer to watch the images that correspond to the
sounds they are hearing
Using a similar technique, researchers have found that by 5
months of age, infants associate facial expressions with
emotion in voices
 Intermodal Perception

A set-up like this one enables researchers to study auditory–

visual intermodal perception
The two computer
screens display
different films, one of
which is coordinated
with a soundtrack
The video camera
records the infant’s
looking toward the
two screens
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EARLY LEARNING AND
MEMORY
Habituation: Early Evidence of
Information-Processing and Memory
Process by which we stop attending or responding to a
stimulus repeated over and over
Improves dramatically throughout the first year of life
Individual differences
Infants who habituate rapidly during the first six to eight
months of life are quicker to understand and use
language during the second year of life.
Classical Conditioning
A neutral stimulus that initially has no effect on the
child eventually elicits a response of some sort,
because it is associated with a second stimulus that
always elicits the response.
Classical conditioning of emotions
Little Albert
 UCS — loud banging noise
 UCR — fearful behavior
 CS — rat
 CR— fearful behavior

Even newborns can be classically conditioned.

Classical Conditioning (cont.)

Figure 6.15 The three phases of

classical conditioning. In the
preconditioning phase, the
unconditioned stimulus (UCS)
always elicits an unconditioned
response (UCR), whereas the
conditioned stimulus (CS) never
does. During the conditioning
phase, the CS and UCS are
paired repeatedly and eventually
associated. At this point, the
learner passes into the
postconditioning phase, in which
the CS alone elicits the original
response (now called a
conditioned response, or CR)
Operant (or Instrumental) Conditioning
Four possible consequences of operant responses
Positive reinforcement: Something pleasant is added to increase
response.
Negative reinforcement: Something unpleasant is removed to increase
response.
Positive punishment: Something unpleasant is added to decrease
response.
Negative punishment: Something pleasant is removed to decrease
response.
Operant conditioning in infancy is at best limited in early infancy.
Infants can remember what they have learned.
The social significance of early operant learning is evident in
infants and their caregivers.
 Operant (or Instrumental) Conditioning
(cont.)

Figure 6.16
Basic principles of operant conditioning
Operant (or Instrumental) Conditioning
(cont.)
Observational Learning
Newborn imitation can be observed for facial
expressions.
Advances in imitation and observational learning
become obvious around 8 to 12 months of age.
Grade school children are capable of verbally
describing model's behavior, and are better at imitating
the model.
Rovee-Collier’s
studies tested
the memory of
young infants