Early Audio and Visual perception - created from Mind Map

Researchers cannot tell what babies perceive the challenge is, is to develop methods that allow infants to demonstrate thisPiaget - sensori motor stage - infants have to develop the links between sensation and actions eg. motor means movement as a basis for mental -representation - the experience of the child that reflects a child understanding of it

Summary: Infants are born with physically immature sensory and nervous systems. Psychologists are interested in understanding how this immaturity impacts on their sensing and perception of the world. Many developmental theorists make assumptions about how infants perceive the world. Piaget assumed that the child can only learn from their sensory experiences through acting on the world. Other theorists claim that infants are born with a basic understanding of some aspects of their environment, either physical features, or social aspects of it.Sensation, perception, cognition and behaviour are part of an integrated, dynamic system. 　 　  

Summary: The human visual system is immature at birth: it continues to develop for several years. In particular, young infants do not have a fully developed central area of vision which picks up fine detail and colour. Infants show visual preferences for some images over others from the first days after birth. Infants are sensitive to some depth information from birth, but this ability continues to develop up to about 6 months of age. The human face is particularly attractive, probably in part because the infant is attuned to stimulus features that faces embody.In laboratory studies that provide information-rich stimuli, infants can show remarkable visual competence, for example newborns are able to distinguish their mothers’ faces from those of strangers. Newborn infants’ preferences for attractive faces, and ability to imitate facial gestures from birth, indicate that they emerge into the world with a genetic preparedness for discriminating between individuals and for bonding with caregivers. 　 　 　 　   　 　 　 　 　 　

Summary: The human auditory system is more mature in its neuroanatomical structures at birth than the visual system. 　 Infants show auditory preferences just as they show visual preferences. Infants discriminate different voices from very soon after birth, if not in utero. They recognize their own mother’s voice and are sensitive to intonation. Infants are sensitive to a range of important phonemic distinctions in speech, some of which do not occur in their language community. Infants learn a great deal about the speech characteristics of their native language before they speak their first word.    　

Cross Modular PerceptionAdult perception of the world is usually not through a single sensory channel; we integrate information from different senses. For example, when people are conversing, they integrate the sound of voices with the movements of bodies, faces and mouths. Also, adults are used to co-ordinating sound with visual locations for objects that produce sound; if you hear a sound to one side of you, you may turn in order to visually find the sound source. Can infants integrate the different sensory modalities in this way, or does this ability only develop as a result of experience? There is some evidence that newborns do have a rudimentary ability to do this sort of integration     　 　 .   　 　 　 　   　 　

Newborn infants show a rudimentary ability to co-ordinate information from different senses. They are sensitive to synchrony and asynchrony, and spatial co-location in learning arbitrary auditory–visual associations.Intersensory redundancy is an important cue in indicating that information from two senses goes together  　 　 . 　 　   　 　

Conclusion: This chapter began with an account of different theories of development. Empiricism was compared with a version of nativism that claims that newborn infants enter the world with pre-existing representations, of objects and people. The development of the visual system and of visual perception was explored in detail and was followed by an account of auditory development with a focus on speech perception. Following this you read an account of the origins and development of cross-modal perception which pointed to the important links between perception and action. Although researchers will often investigate a single sensory modality it is important to appreciate that development throughout life involves the integration of information from many systems operating in parallel, and that the development of any one system or sensory modality is intimately linked with the development of others.  

Early Audio and Visual perception

Infants visual system

Infants Auditory System