Perception

Contingent responses dependent upon one thing (not random). Taking in world around
you and acting accordingly.

Sensory modalities:
Visual
Auditory
(Kinesthetic where your body is in space)
(Olfactory)
(Gustatory)

How do these modalities have a role within social development?

Nativist-Empiricist Debate:
Nativists:
o (Descartes) intuitively hold knowledge of the mathematics that governs
understanding of angles. Not a learning process.
o (Kant) Thinking not based on experience, sensations intuitively organized
into meaningful perceptions.
Constructivists:
o (Berkeley) Perception learnt through mountains of experience and adjusting
to these experiences. Theorised through feedback in tactile and kinesthetic
domains (touch teaches vision).
o (Helmholtz) Intuiting senses hypothesis unnecessary.

William James: attacked by senses in a buzz of confusion. Perception sparse blunt with
sensory instruments. Hebb/Piaget: Visual perception severely impoverished during infancy
and develops and is organized through extensive learning.

Visual Perception: optical nerve: perceptual information transferred to occipital lobe.
Infants born with anatomy needed for vision but vision is not at adult levels during
development.

Timeline of visual perception:
At birth: poor visual acuity, reduced peripheral vision, monocular, can follow bright
light but tracking is slow (Aslin, 1981), prefer faces. Impoverished version of visual
perception.
2-4 months: rapid improvement in visual acuity, binocular vision, increase in smooth
pursuit, increase in visual fixation, endogenous gaze following.
6 months: saccades and smooth pursuit (tracking).
12 months: adult-like distance focal vision, improved depth perception.

With low acuity you are going to prefer bolder patterns. Parents holding baby at a distance
such that the baby can perceive more.

Preference for faces. (Johnson et al 1991) Is this innate? Infants shown paddleboards with
faces/non-faces on. Is the organization of facial features important? Looking time/will they
track it? Infants moved the most with their head and eyes towards the face preferred this
to the scrambled/blank faces.

Johnson and Morton, 1993 species specific predisposition.
Slater, 1993 opposed notion of innateness. Faces contain features that in general are
attractive to infants (move, sounds, high contrast, 3D)
Di Giorgio, 2011 recent.

Endogenous attention: contingent planned behaviour motivation driving attention.
Exogenous attention: unplanned response.

Around two months, tracking eyes much more than other parts of face. This gives you an
idea of what the other person is thinking eyes are expressive. (Maurer and Maurer, 1988).

Farroni et al, 2002 infants follow averted gaze, and then check back. Gathering further
information e.g. do you look scared about this? Should I therefore also be? Mapping a word
to an object.

Booth et al, 2002; Bardi et al, 2011 preference for human figures (dot figures), especially
biological motion.

Saffran et al, 2006 audition is one of the most developed of the senses at birth. Can detect
and differentiate frequency, amplitude, localisation. Infants have a higher sensitivity to
higher frequencies parental behaviour is to increase their frequency (Infant Directed
Speech) attention will be longer/higher. IDS ubiquitous across cultures (Fernald et al, 1989)
Supports language development by increasing the clarity of grammatical phrasing and
intonation associations (Weker et al, 2007)

Newman and Hussain, 2006; Vouloumanos et al, 2010 preference for speech over complex
non-speech sounds.

Infants respond in the same way to a huge variety of languages no innate preference for a
specific language. Wont perceive them in the same way. Narrowing down languages.
(Saffran et al, 2006) infants show decreased sensitivity to phonetic differences not used in
the native language. Elsabbagh, 2013.

Kinesthetic perception placement, movement, touch. When born, tactile perception is
ready and functional. Can detect touch, can feel pain/comfort but do not have postural
control cannot move into more preferable positions. Thus their mechanisms to change
position are to offer communicative cues of comfort and discomfort.

When an infant cries a parents initial response is to pick up the child. (Jahromi et al, 2004)
The child responds with reduced heart rate and increased attention (Korner and Thoman,
1970). Soothing response is ecologically driven increases your chance of survival.

Increased visual exploration following handling, and reduces crying.

Summary:
Perceptual senses are specified, organized and offer support for the drive to obtain
and maintain contact with caregivers.
Experience shapes the organization and trajectory of sensory development.