Understanding Perceptual, Motor, and Conceptual Development in Infants and Children

Posted on Apr 27, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

Perceptual Development

Sensation is the processing of basic information from the world through our sense organs (eyes, ears, skin), such as light and sound waves.

Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information into something meaningful, like hearing a melody.

Methods for Studying Infant Perception

Preferential Looking

This method involves presenting two stimuli to a baby and observing which one they look at for a longer duration, indicating a preference. This method relies on the baby’s ability to differentiate between the stimuli.

Example: Fantz placed pairs of stimuli in front of infants and measured the time they spent looking at each one.

Habituation

Habituation occurs when the same stimulus is presented repeatedly, leading to a decrease in looking time as individuals become bored.

Steps:

  1. Habituation/Familiarization: Repeatedly present a familiarization event until the infant’s looking time decreases by a specific amount.
  2. Test: Show two new events. If the looking time increases for one event but not the other (dishabituation), it suggests that the infant perceives one event as more surprising.

Violation of Expectation: If an action violates what infants expect to see, they will be surprised and show more interest, leading to dishabituation.

Habituation is highly adaptive, allowing individuals to move on to learn about new things once they remember old stimuli. Infants who habituate rapidly and show a greater preference for novelty tend to have higher IQs.

Development of the Senses

The senses begin to develop prenatally, allowing for recognition after birth.

Smell

  • Newborns respond to smell and can recognize the scent of their birth parent and their own amniotic fluid.

Taste

  • Infants show appropriate reactions to taste and may have lasting preferences based on prenatal exposure (e.g., preferring foods their mothers ate during pregnancy).

Touch

  • While prenatal exposure to touch is limited, newborns respond reflexively to it. Touch, such as through massage, can aid in the development of premature infants.

Auditory

  • Fetal:
    • Sounds are muffled, and fetuses primarily hear low pitches.
    • The mother’s voice is particularly clear. The “Cat in the Hat” study showed that infants preferred listening to the same story they heard prenatally, even when read by a different person.
  • Infant:
    • Newborns have a different auditory threshold than adults and cannot hear as many sounds.
    • Infants hear the range of human speech best and prefer it.

Visual

  • Prenatal: Vision is the least developed sense prenatally.
  • Infant:
    • Visual Acuity: Infants prefer more complex patterns and can discriminate between increasingly narrow lines as they age. Newborn vision is around 20/400-600 and reaches adult levels by age 1.
    • Color Perception: Newborns can only distinguish white from other shades and red from white. By 3-4 months, color perception becomes similar to that of adults.

Integrating Sensory Information

Infants can combine information from different sensory systems. For example, they can recognize an object they have touched by sight.

  • Studies show that infants can match sounds to visuals, synchronize voices to lip movements, match voices with gender, and match intonation with emotional facial expressions.

Object Perception

  • Infants differentiate objects based on color, texture, edges, gaps, and motion.
  • They prefer certain stimuli over others, particularly symmetrical and vertical ones.
  • Face Perception:
    • Newborns show a preference for faces from birth and can recognize their mother’s face within hours.
    • They prefer attractive faces and faces with open eyes and direct gaze.
    • Visual scanning of faces becomes more focused on the center (eyes and lips) as infants age.
    • Experience influences face perception, leading to better recognition of faces from their own race by 9 months.

Motor Development

Early Motor Development

  • Movements are initially jerky and uncoordinated.
  • Infants are born with several innate reflexes, which are fixed action patterns triggered by specific stimuli.

Reflexes

Reflexes expected at birth include grasping, rooting, sucking, swallowing, eyeblink, stepping, Moro reflex, and Babinski reflex.

Factors Influencing Motor Development

Motor development involves gradual changes in brain maturation, physical strength, body proportions, posture control, balance, perceptual skills, motivation, and body awareness.

Gross Motor Skills

  • Locomotion: The ability to move around independently typically begins around 8 months and progresses through crawling, cruising, and walking (around 12-14 months).
  • Perception and Locomotion:
    • The visual cliff experiment demonstrates that fear of heights develops with locomotor experience.
    • Social referencing, where infants use emotional cues from others, can influence their willingness to cross the visual cliff.
    • Infants may not generalize what they learn from one skill to another (e.g., stopping at a cliff while crawling but walking over it).
  • Cultural and Environmental Factors: Practices such as back or belly sleeping, carrying or restraining babies, and providing extra muscle training can influence the timing of motor milestones.

Fine Motor Skills

  • Reaching: Infants begin reaching for objects around 3-4 months, but their movements are clumsy until around 7 months.
  • Grasp: The pincer grasp develops between 9-12 months, and good eye-hand coordination is achieved by age 1.

Perception and Action

  • Infants adjust their actions based on their perception of object properties (e.g., walking on a floor versus crawling on a waterbed).
  • However, studies show that even older children may not always integrate what they see and do, leading to scale errors when interacting with miniature objects.

Conceptual Development

Core Knowledge Theory

This theory proposes that infants and children actively try to make sense of the world by forming theories, which they modify as they receive new information. It suggests that people are born with mental structures (modules) specialized for learning about specific domains, such as recognizing faces or language.

Domains of Core Knowledge

  1. Objects (Naive Physics): Understanding the physical properties and behavior of objects.
  2. Living Things (Naive Biology): Understanding the characteristics and processes of living organisms.
  3. People (Naive Psychology): Understanding the mental states, intentions, and behaviors of others.
  4. Language: Acquiring and using language to communicate.

Naive Physics

  • Object Permanence: Studies using violation of expectation paradigms show that infants understand object permanence much earlier than Piaget proposed. They can track hidden objects, reach for them in the dark, and adjust their hand movements based on object size.
  • Infants also understand concepts such as contact, support, and gravity.

Naive Biology

Children develop an understanding of living things, distinguishing between artifacts (human-made objects) and natural kinds (objects found in nature).

  • Essentialism: Children develop the view that living things have an essence that makes them what they are. Studies show that young children may believe that transforming the appearance of an animal can change its species.
  • Children learn about movement, growth, inheritance, illness, sleep, and death as part of their understanding of biology.

Naive Psychology

Children develop an understanding of other people’s mental states and how they influence behavior.

  • Infants show an early understanding of goals and intentions, expecting human behavior to be goal-oriented.
  • They can imitate intended actions, even without seeing the completed action, suggesting an appreciation of mental states.
  • Theory of Mind (ToM): The ability to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from one’s own. Children typically develop ToM around age 4.
  • ToM improves with age due to brain development, social interactions, and the development of other cognitive skills.

Understanding Fantasy and the Supernatural

  • Pretending: Symbolic play begins around 15-18 months and evolves into sociodramatic play, where children represent the thoughts and actions of others.
  • Fantasy vs. Reality: While young children may struggle to distinguish between fantasy and reality in some situations, they generally understand the difference by 3-4 years old.
  • Imaginary Friends: Many children have imaginary friends and understand that others cannot see them.
  • Fantastical Figures: Beliefs in figures like Santa Claus are often supported by parents and communities.
  • God and Supernatural Agents: Understanding God can be challenging as it violates some aspects of naive physics, biology, and psychology. Children’s beliefs about God and supernatural agents develop over time, influenced by cultural and religious contexts.
  • Research suggests that children may have a predisposition to perceive agency and intentions, even in inanimate objects or invisible agents. However, this does not necessarily mean they are predisposed to believe in supernatural entities.