SEEING, THINKING

AND DOING IN
INFANCY
PERCEPTION

Joalann alesley
Kevin Nembhard
Parents of new babies
cannot help wondering
what their children
experience—how much
they can see, how well they
can hear.
 latest research have demonstrated that infants come
into the world with all their sensory systems functioning
to some degree and that subsequent development
occurs at a very rapid pace.

I see
I hear you
you
I smell you

I feel you
Sensation: refers to the processing of basic
information from the external world by the
sensory receptors in the sense organs (eyes,
ears, skin, etc.) and brain.

Perception: is the process of organizing and

interpreting sensory information about the
objects, events, and spatial layout of the world
around us.
 VISION PERCEPTION
 Humans rely more heavily on vision than most species do:
 newborns begin visually exploring the world minutes after leaving the womb.
 Their vision improve rapidly after their first month
PREFERENTIAL LOOKING TECHNIQUE
A method for studying visual attention in infants
 Habituation
Repeatedly presenting an infant with a Then a novel stimulus is presented. If the
given stimulus until the infant’s infant’s response increases, the researcher infers
response to it habituates, that is, that the baby can discriminate between the old
declines. and new stimulus.
 VISUAL ACTIVITY

 infants generally prefer to look at

patterns of high visual contrast
 young infants have poor contrast
sensitivity: they can detect a pattern
only when it is composed of highly
contrasting elements.
 VISUAL ACTIVITY
 One reason for this poor contrast sensitivity is the
immaturity of infants’ cones, the light-sensitive
neurons that are highly concentrated in the fovea
(the central region of the retina) and are involved in
seeing fine detail and color. In infancy, the cones
have a different size and shape and are spaced
farther apart than in adulthood. As a consequence,
newborns’ cones catch only 2% of the light striking
the fovea, compared with 65% for adults. This is
partly why in their first month, babies have only
about 20/120 vision. visual acuity develops so
rapidly that by 8 months of age, infants’ vision
approaches that of adults, with full adult acuity
present by around 6 years of age.
 Visual Activity
 For the first month or so, infants do not share adults’
experience of a richly colorful world. At best, they can
distinguish some shades from white. By 2 or 3 months
of age, infants’ color vision is similar to that of adults.
 4- and 5-month-olds prefer the same basic colors that
adults rate as most pleasant—red and blue. They also
perceive the boundaries between colors in more or less
the same way as adults do: they respond equivalently to
two shades that adults label as the same color (e.g.,
“blue”), and they discriminate between two shades that
adults refer to with different color names (e.g., “blue”
and “green”)
 VISION: OBJECT PERCEPTION
 One of the most remarkable things about our
perception of objects in the world around us is how
stable that perception is. When another person
approaches or moves away from us, or slowly turns in
a circle, our retinal image of the person changes in size
and shape, but we do not have the impression that the
person gets larger or smaller or changes shape.
Instead, we perceive a constant shape and size, a
phenomenon known as perceptual constancy.
 VISION: DEPTH PERCEPTION
 To navigate through our environment, we
need to know where we are with respect to
the objects and landmarks around us. We
use many sorts of depth and distance cues
to tell us whether we can reach the coffee
cup on our desk or whether the
approaching car is far enough away that we
can safely cross in front of it. From the
beginning, infants are sensitive to some of
these cues, and they rapidly become
sensitive to the rest.
 VISION: DEPTH PERCEPTION
 One cue that infants are sensitive to very early on is
optical expansion, in which the visual image of an
object increases in size as the object comes toward
us, occluding more and more of the background.
When an image of an approaching object expands
symmetrically, we know that the object is headed
right for us, and a sensible response is to duck.
Babies cannot duck, but infants
 asyoung as 1 month old blink defensively at an
expanding image that appears to be an object
heading toward them.
 VISION: DEPTH PERCEPTION
 Another depth cue that emerges early is due to the
simple fact that we have two eyes. Because of the
distance between them, the retinal image of an
object at any instant is never quite the same in both
eyes. Consequently, the eyes never send quite the
same signal to the brain—a phenomenon known as
binocular disparity. The closer the object we are
looking at, the greater the disparity between the
two images; the farther away the object, the less
the disparity.

 Auditory perception

 Another rich source of infants’ information

about the world is sound. The human
auditory system is relatively well developed
at birth, although newborns can still be
characterized as a bit hard of hearing. The
faintest sound a newborn responds to is
roughly four times louder than the quietest
sound an adult can detect. Not until 5 to 8
years of age does hearing approach adult
levels.
 Auditory perception

 When a newborn baby hears a sound they tend

to turn toward it, a phenomenon referred to as
auditory localization.
 Taste and Smell
 Sensitivity to taste and smell develops before birth, and
newborns show an innate preference for sweet flavors.
Preferences for smells are also present very early in life.
Newborns prefer the smell of the natural food source for
human infants—breast milk. Smell plays a powerful role in
how a variety of infant mammals learn to recognize their
mothers. It probably does the same for humans, as shown by
studies in which infants chose between the scent of their own
mother and that of another woman. A pad that an infant’s
mother had worn next to her breast was placed on one side of
the infant’s head and a pad worn by a different woman was
placed on the other side. Two-week-old infants turned more
often and spent more time oriented to the pad infused with
their mother’s unique scent.
 Touch
 Another important way that infants
learn about the environment is
through active touch, whether with
their hands and fingers or mouth and
tongue. Oral exploration dominates
for the first few months, as infants
mouth and suck on their own fingers
and toes, as well as virtually any
object they come into contact with.
 Touch
 From around the age of 4 months, as infants gain greater
control over their hand and arm movements, manual exploration
increases and gradually takes precedence over oral exploration.
 Infants actively rub, finger, probe, and bang objects, and their
actions become increasingly specific to the properties of the
objects. For example, they tend to rub textured objects and
bang rigid ones
 Increasing manual control facilitates visual exploration in that
infants can hold interesting objects in order to examine them
more closely, rotating the objects to view them from different
angles and transferring them from hand to hand to get a better
view.
 Motor Development
 REFLEXES: Newborns start off with some tightly
organized patterns of action known as neonatal reflexes.
Some reflexes, such as withdrawal from a painful
stimulus, have clear adaptive value; others have no
known adaptive significance. In the grasping reflex,
newborns close their fingers around anything that
presses against the palm of their hand. When stroked
on the cheek near their mouth, infants exhibit the rooting
reflex, turning their head in the direction of the touch and
opening their mouth.
 Motor Development
 When a babies cheek comes into contact with their
mother’s breast, they turn toward the breast, opening
their mouth as they do. Oral contact with the nipple then
sets off a sucking reflex, followed by the swallowing
reflex, both of which increase the baby’s chance of
getting nourishment and ultimately of surviving. These
reflexes are not fully automatic; for example, a rooting
reflex is more likely to occur when an infant is hungry.
Motor development-Types of infant reflexes
 Motor Development
 The presence of strong reflexes at birth is a sign
that the newborn’s central nervous system is in
good shape. Reflexes that are either abnormally
weak or abnormally vigorous may be a sign of
brain damage. Most of the neonatal reflexes
disappear on a regular schedule, although
some—including coughing, sneezing, blinking,
and withdrawing from pain—remain throughout
life. Persistence of a neonatal reflex beyond the
point at which it is expected to disappear can
indicate a neurological problem.
 Motor Milestones
 MOTOR MILESTONES: Infants progress quickly
in acquiring the basic movement patterns of
our species, The achievement of each of
the major “motor milestones” of infancy,
especially walking, constitutes a major
advance in the infant’s experience of the
world.
 MOTOR MILESTONES
 0-3 Months
 While lying on tummy, pushes
up on arms
 While lying on tummy, lifts and
holds head up
 Able to move fists from closed
to open
 Able to bring hands to mouth
 Moves legs and arms off of
surface when excited
 4-6 Months
 Uses hands to support self while
sitting
 Rolls from back to tummy and
tummy to back
 While standing with support,
accepts entire weight with legs
 Reaches for toys while on
tummy
 While lying on back, reaches
both hands to play with feet
 While lying on back, transfers a
toy from one hand to the other
 MOTOR MILESTTONES
 7-9 Months  10-12 Months
 Sits without support  Pulls to stand and cruises along furniture
 Sits and reaches for toys without falling  Stands alone and takes several independent
 Moves from tummy or back into sitting steps

 Starts to move with alternate leg and arm  Moves in and out of various positions to explore
movement e.g. creeping, crawling environment and get desired toys

 Picks up head and pushes through elbows  Maintains balance in sitting when throwing
during Tummy Time objects
 Turns head to visually track objects while  Claps hands
sitting
 Releases objects into a container with a large
 Shows more control while rolling and sitting opening
 Picks up small objects with thumbs and
fingers  Uses thumb and pointer finger to pick up tiny
objects
 In simple play imitates others
Expanding the
world of the infant
 REACHING
 The development of reaching sets off a mini-revolution in
the infant’s life: “once infants can reach for and grasp
objects, they no longer have to wait for the world to come to
them.” However, reaching takes time to develop. That is
because, this seemingly simple behavior actually involves a
complex interaction of multiple, independent components,
including muscle development, postural control,
development of various perceptual and motor skills.
 REACHING
 Initially, infants are limited to pre-reaching movements—clumsy
swiping toward the general vicinity of objects they see. At around 3 to
4 months of age, they begin successfully reaching for objects,
although their movements are initially somewhat jerky and poorly
controlled.
 At around 7 months, as infants gain the ability to sit independently,
their reaching becomes quite stable, and the trajectory of their reaches
is consistently smooth and straight to the target. Infants’ sphere of
action is enlarged by the achievement of stable sitting and reaching,
because they can now lean forward to capture objects previously out
of reach.
 REACHING
 When reaching infants seem to rely on the “feel” of their hand and arm
movement, vision is not necessary for accurate reaching: 4- to 8-month-old
infants in a completely dark room can successfully nab an invisible object that
is making a sound. In addition, when reaching for objects they can see,
infants rarely reach for ones that are too distant, suggesting that they have
some sense of how long their arms are.

 With age and practice, infants’ reaching shows increasingly clear signs of
anticipation; for example, when reaching toward a large object, infants open
their fingers widely and adjust their hand to the orientation of the desired
object. Infants can make contact with a moving object by anticipating its
trajectory and aiming their reach slightly ahead of it. Most impressive, 10-
month-olds’ approach to an object is affected by what they intend to do after
they get their hands on it. Like adults, they reach faster for an object that they
plan to throw than for one they plan to use in a more precise fashion.
 SELF LOCOMOTION
 Self-Locomotion: At around 8 months of age, infants
become capable for the first time in their lives of self-
locomotion, that is, of moving around in the environment on
their own. No longer limited to being only where someone
else carries or puts them, their world must seem vastly
larger.
 SELF LOCOMOTION
 Infants’ first
success at moving forward under their own
power typically takes the form of crawling. Most infants
begin by belly crawling or using other idiosyncratic
patterns of self propulsion, one of which researchers
refer to as the “inchworm belly-flop” style. Most belly
crawlers then shift to hands and-knees crawling, which
is less effortful and faster.
 SELF LOCOMOTION-Walking
 When infants first begin walking independently, at around 11 to 12 months,
they keep their feet relatively wide apart, which increases their base of
support; they flex slightly at the hip and knee, thereby lowering their center
of gravity; they keep their hands in the air to facilitate balance; and they
have both feet on the ground 60% of the time (as opposed to only 20% for
adults).. As they grow larger and gain experience, their steps become
longer, straighter, and more consistent. Practice is vital to infants’ gradual
mastery over their initially weak muscles and precarious balance.
 Self Locomotion-Walking
 .Eleanor Gibson and her colleagues found that
infants adjust their mode of locomotion according to
their perception of the properties of the surface they
want to traverse. For example, an infant who had
promptly walked across a rigid plywood walkway
would prudently revert to crawling in order to get
across a water bed.
 Locomotion -Challenges
 The challenge that young children experience in
integrating perceptual information in the planning and
execution of actions sometimes results in quite
surprising behaviors, especially when children fail to
meet the challenge. A particularly dramatic example
of failure in the integration of perception and action is
provided by scale errors. In this kind of error, very
young children try to do something with a miniature
replica object that is far too small for the action to be
at all possible. Toddlers will attempt, in all
seriousness, to sit in a tiny, dollhouse-sized chair or
to get into a small toy car.
 LEARNING
 It is safe to say that a 10-month-old infant learns
much faster than an adult, just because there is so
much that is new to an infant.

 Habituation: The simplest and earliest form of learning is

recognizing something that has been experienced before.
babies—like everybody else—tend to respond relatively less
to stimuli they have previously experienced and relatively
more to novel ones. The occurrence of habituation in
response to repeated stimulation reveals that learning has
taken place; the infant has formed a memory representation
of the repeated, and now familiar, stimulus. Habituation is
highly adaptive: diminished attention to what is old and
known enables infants to pay attention to, and learn about,
what is new.
 LEARNING
 The speed with which an infant habituates is believed to reflect
the general efficiency of the infant’s processing of information.
Related measures of attention, including duration of looking
and degree of novelty preference, are also taken as measures
of speed and efficiency of processing. A substantial and
surprising degree of continuity has been found between these
measures in infancy and general cognitive ability later in life.
Infants who habituate relatively rapidly, who take relatively
short looks at visual stimuli, and/or who show a greater
preference for novelty tend to have higher IQs when tested as
much as 18 years later. Thus, one of the earliest and simplest
forms of human learning is fundamental to basic cognitive
development.
 PERCEPTUAL LEARNING
 Perceptual Learning: From the beginning, infants actively
search for order and regularity in the world around them, and
they learn a great deal from simply paying close attention to
the objects and events they perceive. According to Eleanor
Gibson (1990), the key process in perceptual learning is
differentiation—extracting from the events in the environment
those elements that are invariant, that remain stable. For
example, infants learn the association between tone of voice
and facial expression because, in their experience, a pleasant,
happy, or eagerly excited tone of voice occurs with a smiling
face—not a frowning one—and a harsh, angry tone of voice
accompanies a frowning face—not a smiling one. With age
and experience, infants become increasingly efficient at
extracting relevant information, and they are able to make finer
and finer discriminations among stimuli.
 PERCEPTUAL LEARNING
 A particularly important part of perceptual learning is
the infant’s discovery of affordances—that is, the
possibilities for action offered, or afforded, by
objects and situations. They discover, for example,
that small objects—but not large ones—can be
picked up; that liquid can be poured and spilled; that
chairs of a certain size can be sat in; Infants
discover affordances by figuring out the relations
between their own bodies and abilities and the
things around them.

 STATISTICAL LEARNING
 Statistical Learning: A related type of learning also involves
simply picking up information from the environment, specifically,
forming associations among stimuli that occur in a statistically
predictable pattern.
 Our natural environment contains a high degree of regularity and
redundancy; certain events occur in a predictable order, certain
objects appear at the same time and place, and so on. A
common example for a baby is the regularity with which the
sound of Mom’s voice is followed by the appearance of her face,
 CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
 Classical conditioning plays a role in infants’ everyday
learning about the relations between environmental events
that have relevance for them. Consider young babies’
mealtimes, which occur frequently and have a predictable
structure. First, the hungry infant is picked up by the mother
(with her unique constellation of perceptual features) and
held in a particular way. Then a breast or bottle contacts the
infant’s mouth, eliciting the sucking reflex. The sucking
causes milk to flow into the infant’s mouth, and the infant
experiences the pleasurable sensations of a delicious taste
and the satisfaction of hunger. Learning is revealed when an
infant’s sucking motions begin to occur at the mere sight of
the bottle or breast.
 CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
 In terms of classical conditioning, the nipple in the infant’s mouth is
an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) that reliably elicits a reflexive,
unlearned response—in this case, the sucking reflex—the
unconditioned response (UCR). Learning, or conditioning, occurs
when an initially neutral stimulus—the breast or bottle, which is the
conditioned stimulus (CS)—repeatedly occurs just before the
unconditioned stimulus (the baby sees the breast or bottle before
receiving the nipple). Gradually, the originally reflexive response—
now the learned or conditioned response (CR)—comes to occur to
the CS (anticipatory sucking movements now begin as soon as the
baby sees the breast or bottle). In other words, the sight of the
bottle or breast has become a signal of what will follow. Gradually,
the infant may also come to associate the mother herself with the
whole sequence, including the pleasurable feelings that result from
feeding. If so, these feelings could eventually be evoked simply by
the presence of the mother. It is thought that many emotional
responses are initially learned through classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning
 INSTRUMENTAL CONDITIONING
 Instrumental Conditioning: A key form of learning for infants. In
everyday life, infants learn that shaking a rattle produces an
interesting sound, that cooing at Dad gets him to coo back, and that
exploring the dirt in a potted plant leads to a parental reprimand. This
kind of learning, referred to as instrumental conditioning (or operant
conditioning), involves learning the relation between one’s own
behavior and the reward or punishment it results in. Most research
on instrumental conditioning in infants involves positive
reinforcement, that is, a reward that reliably follows a behavior and
increases the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated. Such
research features a contingency relation between the infant’s
behavior and the reward: if the infant makes the target response,
then he or she receives the reinforcement.
INSTRUMENTAL CONDITIONING
 OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING

 Observational Learning/Imitation: A particularly potent

source of infants’ learning is their observation of other
people’s behaviors. Parents, who are often amused and
sometimes embarrassed by their toddler’s reproduction of
their own behavior, are well aware that their offspring learn
a great deal through simple observation.

 The ability to imitate the behavior of other people appears

to be present very early in life, albeit in an extremely
limited form. Researchers found that after newborns watch
an adult model slowly and repeatedly stick out his or her
tongue, they often stick out their own tongue.
 OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING
 By the age of 6 months, infant imitation is quite robust. Six-month-old
infants not only imitate tongue protrusion but they also attempt to poke
their tongue out to the side when that is what they have seen an adult
do. From this age on, the scope of infant imitation expands. Infants
begin to imitate novel, and sometimes quite strange, actions they have
seen performed on objects.
 In one procedure that demonstrates this, infants observe an
experimenter performing unusual behaviors with objects, such as
leaning over from the waist to touch his or her forehead to a box,
causing the box to light up. The infants are later presented with the
same objects the experimenter had acted on. Infants as young as 6 to
9 months old imitate some of the novel actions they have witnessed,
even after a delay of 24 hours. Fourteen-month-olds imitate such
actions as long as a full week later.
 OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING
 In choosing to imitate a model, infants seem to analyze the reason for
the person’s behavior. If infants see a model lean over and touch a
box with her forehead, they later do the same. If, however, the model
remarks that she’s cold and tightly clutches a shawl around her body
as she leans over and touches a box with her forehead, infants reach
out and touch the box with their hand instead of their head. They
apparently reason that the model wanted to touch the box and would
have done so in a standard way if her hands had been free. Their
imitation is thus based on their analysis of the person’s intentions. In
general, infants are flexible in learning through imitation: as in the case
of touching the box, they can copy either the specific behavior through
which a model achieves a goal, or they can employ different behaviors
to achieve the same goal the model achieved.
 COGNITION
 Clearly,infants are capable of learning
in a variety of ways. But do they actually
think?
Developmental scientists have been hard at
work over the past twenty years or so trying
to find out to what extent infants engage in
cognition (knowledge, thought, reasoning).
mechanisms.
 PHYSICAL KNOWLEDGE
 Infants’ knowledge about the physical world is not limited to
what they know and are learning about objects. Research
has examined what they know about physical phenomena,
such as gravity. Even in the first year of life, infants seem to
appreciate that objects do not float in midair, that an object
that is inadequately supported will fall, that a non-round
object placed on a stable surface will stay put, and so forth.
For example, in a series of studies in which infants observed
a ball being released on a slope, 7-month-olds (but not 5-
montholds) looked longer when the ball moved up the slope
than when it moved down, indicating that they had expected
the ball to go down. Similarly, they looked longer at an object
that traveled more slowly as it rolled down a slope than at
one that picked up speed.
 SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE
 In addition to acquiring knowledge about the physical world, infants
need to learn about the social world—about people and their behavior.
 An important aspect of social knowledge that emerges relatively early
is the understanding that the behavior of others is purposive and goal-
directed. In research by Amanda Woodward (1998), 6-month-old
infants saw a hand repeatedly reach toward one of two objects sitting
side by side in a display. Then the position of the two objects was
reversed, and the hand reached again. The question was whether the
infants interpreted the reaching behavior as directed toward a
particular object. They did, as shown by their looking longer when the
hand went to the new object (in the old place) than when it reached for
the old object it had reached to before. Thus, the infants apparently
interpreted the reaching behavior as directed toward a particular
object. However, this was true only for a human hand; another group of
infants did not react the same way when a mechanical arm did the
reaching.
 SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE
 Subsequent research by Sommerville, Woodard, and
Needham (2005) established that infants’ understanding of the
goal-directed nature of another’s actions, as in the above
study, is related to their own experience achieving a goal.
Three month- olds, who were not yet able to pick up objects
on their own, were fitted with Velcro “sticky mittens” that
enabled them to capture Velcro-patched toys. Their brief
experience successfully “picking up” objects enabled them to
interpret the goal-directed reaching of others in the Woodward
procedure described above a few months earlier than they
would otherwise have been able to do.

Picture with
Caption Layout
Caption