Chapter 5: Basic Sensory and Perceptual Processes
Smell, taste and touch
- Newborns respond positively to pleasant smell (honey, chocolate) and negatively to unpleasant
smells (rotten eggs)
- They have a highly developed sense of taste
o Can differentiate salty, sour, bitter and sweet tastes
o They are sensitive to changes in the taste of breast milk (reflects the mother’s diet)
- Touch: touching an infant’s cheek, mouth, hand or foot produces reflexive movements
Hearing
- Auditory threshold: the quietest sound that a person can hear
o Testing have shown that adults can hear better than infants
Adults can hear quiet sounds that infants can’t
o Infants hear sounds that have normal pitches
By 4.5 months, they can recognize their own name
Seeing
- Visual acuity: smallest pattern that one can distinguish reliably
o Infants will look at patterned stimuli instead of plain, nonpatterned ones
E.g., infant will look at striped pattern rather than grey pattern
- Colour perception:
o Wavelength of light is a source of colour perception
o Cones: specialized neurons in the back of the eye that detect wavelength of light
o Newborns are able to only see a few colours by 3 months, they will be able to see the
full range of colours
- Sensory information:
o Infants can only visually recognize an object they touched previously
o Babies can also find relations between information visually presented and auditorily
They will take longer if the object’s motion matches it sounds
E.g., higher pitched when it rises
o They can even link their own body movement to music rhythm
Complex Perceptual and Attentional Processes
Perceiving Objects
- Newborn perception of objects develop rapidly in 1st few months after birth
o By 4 months, infants use cues to determine which elements go together to form objects
o E.g., when 2 objects move together, we can perceive them as parts of the same object
- Examples of cues:
o Motion (moving same time?)
o Colour (2 parts same/different colour?)
o Texture
- Size constancy: realization that object’s actual size remains the same despite changes in size of
its retinal
o E.g., the baby eyes growing bigger does not make the object he sees bigger
- Visual expansion: as object moves closer, it fills greater proportion of the retina
- Motion parallax: objects moves faster when they are closer, slower at a distance
- By 4 months, infants will be able to retinal disparity
o Left and right eyes often see slightly different versions of the same scene
- By 7 months, infants will be able to pictorial cues
o Cues used in paintings to convey a deeper meaning
Perceiving faces
- Infants prefer attractive faces over unattractive faces
- In the first few months, infants can recognize human & nonhuman faces
o 3 months old prefer to look at faces from their own race & can recognize faces from
another race
- Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): difficulty in recognizing faces with facial
emotional expression
Attention
- Attention: processes that determine which information will be processed further by an individual
o ignore stimuli that aren’t important
- ADHD: infants will have special problems when it comes to paying attention
o Exhibits 3 symptoms:
Hyperactivity: children are unusually energetic & unable to keep still
Inattention: unable to pay attention in class and concentrate on schoolwork
Impulsivity: act before thinking
Motor Development
- Locomotion: ability to move around in the world
o By about 4 months, babies can sit upright with support
o By 6-7 months, they can sit without support
o By 7-8 months, they can stand if they hold onto an object for support
o By 11 months, they can stand alone briefly and walk with assistance
At this stage, they are called toddlers
Children can only step until they reached 10 months because they must be able
to stand upright before then
o Most 2 years old have hurried walk instead of true run (they are unable to bend below
knees)
- Fine motor skills: motor skills associated with grasping, holding, and manipulating objects
o By 4 months, infants can reach for objects (they don’t immediately reach the object)
They grab an object tightly with their fingers alone
o By 6 months, they are given “finger foods” they can pick it up but getting them into
the mouth is hard
o By 7-8 months, infants can now use their thumbs to hold objects
They are able to position their hands to make grasping easier
o At 1 years-old, they are ready to try eating with a spoon
o At 2-3, they can put on some simple clothing and use zippers BUT NOT BUTTONS
o At 3-4, they can fasten buttons and take off their clothes when going to the washroom
o At 5, they can undress and dress themselves except for tying shoes
- Dynamic systems theory: skills that is organized and reorganized over time to meet demands of
specific tasks
o Infants uses environmental cues to determine whether a surface is suitable for walking
(stairs)
Physical Fitness
- 2-3 years old: can run, kick a ball, climb on furniture
- 3-4: can ride tricycle, stand on one foot
- 4-5: can skip, throw ball overhand, run smoothly
- 5-6: ride bike without training wheels
