Sensation & Perception

PS20107
Nathalia Gjersoe
 Possible exam questions

1. The world of the baby is “…one great blooming, buzzing confusion”

(William James, 1890). Critically discuss.
2. Critically evaluate why young infants so consistently make the A-
not-B error.
(Mid semester essay: Critically evaluate how perception is important
for the development of cognitive skills. )

Developmental Psychology
 LOIL 1 – What to expect
LOIL 1 Wed 10th Feb
1. Sensation and perception introduction
2. Theoretical perspectives & methods
LOIL 2 Thu 11th Feb
4. Object perception
5. Face perception
Summary
Developmental Psychology
 1. Sensation & Perception
Introduction

Developmental Psychology
Sensation &
Perception 3
Mind and Behaviour
Ian Fairholm
 Sensation
SENSATION: simple awareness due to stimulation of the sense
organ.
Basic registration of light, sound, pressure, odour or taste as parts of your body
interact with the physical world

Developmental Psychology
 Perception

PERCEPTION: MENTAL
the organisation, REPRESENTATION:
identification and patterns of neuronal
interpretation of a activity that refer to
sensation in order to aspects of the
form a mental external world
representation.

Developmental Psychology
 Dissociations between
sensation & perception

Clinical populations reveal that its possible for sensation to be working

but perception to be impaired. For instance, in prosopagnosia, people’s
eyes function correctly but patients stop recognising familiar faces.
Developmental Psychology
 Dissociations between
sensation & perception

Dissociations of sensation and perception are even evident in

healthy populations. Can you see what is in this picture?
Developmental Psychology
 Sensory Perceptual
Stimulus/Sense representation
e.g. photons process
e.g. activation of e.g. lines are fed
stimulate cells in line sensitive into face detector
the retina neurones in the system
visual cortex

Cognition
Perceptual
Action representation
e.g. Recognition –
e.g. Smile, “That is someone e.g. face
reach-out, I know!” representation of
approach individual stored

Developmental Psychology Adapted from Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner & Hood, 2012
Why study perceptual development?

Why study infant perception?

•  Early diagnosis & treatment
•  Nature & Nurture debates
•  Inform Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
•  Foundations of social and cognitive development

Developmental Psychology
 What can newborns see

Adult acuity Newborn acuity (30x less than an adults)

https://www.babycentre.co.uk/v25012787/your-newborns-senses-video

Developmental Psychology
 Vision
• Vision
• Least mature sense
• Detect changes in brightness (reflex)
• Can see patterns, show preferences
• See colors, although discrimination is good by 2–3
months
• Poor acuity, see as well as adults by 12 months

Developmental Psychology
 Early sensory capabilities

• Rapidity with which sensory functioning

achieves adult levels is striking
• Especially in contrast to other domains, such as
cognition

Developmental Psychology
 2 Theoretical Perspectives & Methods
Infant Perception

Developmental Psychology
 Infant Perception
(a.k.a. How do we become able to think?)

• What can infants perceive at birth?

• In what ways do their perceptual abilities change over the first few
months of life? (Description)
• (How )do their perceptual abilities change over development?
(Explanation/mechanisms)

Developmental Psychology
 Empiricist View
sight
hearing

taste smell

touch
entrails

William James (1890) “...the baby assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin and
entrails at one feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion...”

Developmental Psychology
 Constructivist View

• Jean Piaget (1957) ‘Perception of light exists from birth (but) All the rest
(perception of forms, sizes, positions, distances, prominence, etc.) is acquired
through the combination of reflex activity with higher activities’

Developmental Psychology
 Object permanence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSGWh2CWJnA (Object
permanence)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt46WxdKUPQ
Developmental Psychology
 How does knowledge change?

Developmental Psychology
 Performance-Competence
debate
• Do babies fail to search because they can’t
mentally represent hidden objects?
(Competence)
OR
• Do babies fail to search because they lack the
physical control, even though they can mentally
represent objects? (Performance)
Developmental Psychology
 Nativist View/Core knowledge
theorists

René Descartes (17th C) - organisation is already built into the

system at birth. Experience simply fills in the boxes.

Elizabeth Spelke: core mental modules — object

representation, approximate number sense, geometric
navigation & social awareness — are all ancient systems
shared at least in part with other animals

Developmental Psychology
 How does knowledge change?

Developmental Psychology
 Infant research techniques

• High Amplitude Sucking

• Visual preferences
• Habituation Looking-time measures
• Violation of Expectation
• Neuroimaging

Developmental Psychology
 High amplitude sucking

Data from 20 newborns

discriminating Japanese from
English sentences (Kuhl et al,
2006)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magaz
ine-22457798

Developmental Psychology
 Visual preference

Early research simply measured how

long infants would look at visual stimuli

Using this simple method, Fantz, in the 1950s &

60s demonstrated that infants had visual
preferences

Developmental Psychology Fantz, 1961

 Habituation
An infant is shown stimulus (A) initially
she looks at it for some time.
If A is presented again and again
eventually the infant will lose interest.
Then if A is changed to B she is likely to
show renewed interest if she can
distinguish between the two stimuli.

Developmental Psychology Slater, Morrison & Rose, 1984

 Violation of Expectation

• Infant sees a rotating panel move back

and forth to the table (possible event)
• Infant becomes habituated and loses
interest
• The experimenter then visibly places a
block behind the rotating panel
• The panel rotates again back and forth
to the table (impossible event)

Developmental Psychology Baillargeon et al, 1985

 Infant research techniques

• Empiricist & Constructivist views see infant as

slowly learning perceptual organisation
• Sophisticated measures that rely on infant
capacities introduced in the 60s
• Nativist perspectives see infant as born with some
expectations and perceptual structures built in

Developmental Psychology
 Infant research techniques

Near Infrared
Electro-encephelogram
Spectroscopy
EEG
(NIRS)

Functional
Magnetic Magnetoencepha
Resonance Imaging -lography (MEG)
(fMRI)

Developmental Psychology
 LOIL 1 Summary
• Sensation is the registration of information through the senses, perception is the
organisation of that information
• Infant visual acuity is significantly worse than that of adults but reaches adult
acuity by 12 months
• Empiricists believe that infants learn to perceive the world through experience
• Nativists believe that some perceptual organisation is built into the system from
birth
• The performance-competence debate asks whether infants lack knowledge, or
lack the ability to show that they have that knowledge
• From the 1950s, more sophisticated methods have been developed to capitalise
on what infants can do – pay attention and get bored – to measure their
capabilities

Developmental Psychology
 LOIL 2 What to expect
LOIL 1 Wed 10th Feb
1. Sensation and perception introduction
2. Theoretical perspectives & methods
LOIL 2 Thu 11th Feb
4. Object perception
5. Face perception
Summary
Developmental Psychology
 Possible exam questions

1. The world of the baby is “…one great blooming, buzzing confusion”

(William James, 1890). Critically discuss.
2. Critically evaluate why young infants so consistently make the A-
not-B error.
(Mid semester essay: Critically evaluate how perception is important for the
development of cognitive skills. )

Developmental Psychology
 4 Object perception – The A-not-B error

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jW668F7HdA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHkJ3InQOE

• Very reliable!
• 8-10 month olds make search for an attractive toy in the previously
correct location (despite watching the hiding) after a short delay.
By 12-months this error stops. What happens in this 2-4 month
period?
• Requires looking, reaching & memory.

Developmental Psychology
 4 Object perception – The A-not-B error

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jW668F7HdA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHkJ3InQOE

• Very reliable!
• 8-10 month olds make search for an attractive toy in the previously
correct location (despite watching the hiding) after a short delay.
By 12-months this error stops. What happens in this 2-4 month
period?
• Requires looking, reaching & memory.

Developmental Psychology
The A-not-B error: Constructivism
• Incomplete object representation (schema, Piaget)

• Can represent an object that has gone out of sight but can not easily
update an object representation with a new location.

• Only by 12 months do babies understand that objects exist

independently of their own actions

• Dominant theory
Developmental Psychology Piaget, 1954
 The A-not-B error
• Infants look to the right location twice as much as they reach there
(Hofstadter & Reznick, 1996)

• Infants look longer (surprise) if the covers are lifted to reveal the toy
in the wrong location (Baillargeon & Graber, 1988)

• Infants make the reach error even when the covers over the hiding
locations are clear (Butterworth, 1977)

Developmental Psychology
The A-not-B error: Nativism/Information
processing theory
During these 2-4 months gap:
• Infants shift their representations of
space,
• Change the functioning of their
prefrontal cortices,
• Learn to inhibit previously correct
responses,
• Change their understanding of the task,
or
• Increase the strength of their
representation until it guides behavior

Developmental Psychology Diamond & Goldman-Rakic, 1999; Cuevas & Bell, 2010; Acredolo,
1979; Bremner, 1978; Diamond, 1988; Munakata, 1998
 The A-not-B error: Dynamic Systems
(Field) Theory
• Based on the principal that all systems are in flux. All of the
explanations above important but not explain all the data
• Measures variability over time rather than within a single session.
• Claims there is no single reason why children make & overcome the
a-not-b error
• A-not-B error is an emergent product of multiple causes interacting
over nested timescales.

Developmental Psychology Smith & Thelen, 2003; Smith et al, 1999

 The A-not-B error: Natural pedagogy

Hey Baby!

Communicative cues No communicative cues

81% of 10-month-olds fail A- 41% of 10-month-olds fail

not-B

Developmental Psychology Topal et al, 2008, 10 month old babies

Natural pedagogy - Csibra & Gergely
Claims that human infants:
i) Are sensitive to ostensive signals that indicate they are being
addressed by communication (eye contact, calling their name)
ii) Develop referential expectations in ostensive contexts (the
communicator expects me to learn something here)
iii) Biased to interpret ostensive-referential communication as
conveying information that is kind-relevant and generalisable
(‘birds have wings’ rather than ‘this bird has wings’).
 The A-not-B error: Summary

• Persistent error in babies aged 8-10 months

• Piaget explained it as incomplete object representation
• Nativists explain it as due to immature frontal
lobe/executive function capacity
• Dynamic field theorists explain it as due to interacting
streams of maturation
• Natural pedagogists suggest the error arises simply because
of methodological issues.

Developmental Psychology
 5 Face recognition
Do babies use the same processes to recognise faces as adults?

Developmental Psychology
 The Thatcher Illusion

Developmental Psychology
 The Thatcher Illusion

Developmental Psychology
Developmental Psychology de Haan, Pascalis & Johnson (2002)
 Early development of face
recognition
• Face inversion (but not object or monkey
inversion) compromises adult recognition (de
Haan, Pascalis & Johnson, 2002)
• Adults, 9mos and 6mos habituated to a face
(monkey or human).
• Adults & 9mos dishabituate: human face but
not monkey face.
• 6mos dishabituate: human face and monkey
face (Pascalis et al, 2002)
Developmental Psychology
 Perceptual narrowing

Developmental Psychology
 Perceptual narrowing
• Infants from around 6 months are very good at face recognition
• Gradually get worse (perceptual narrowing)
• Older infants, children and adults use more holistic facial recognition
techniques which make recognition swifter and more efficient but
more open to potential errors
• (Phoneme distinction (Kuhl et al, 2006) is another example of
perceptual narrowing)

Developmental Psychology
 Face preferences in newborns

• Modified visual preference technique

• Infants’ abilities to follow an moving object
• Infants were 1 hour old
• Johnson & Moreton (1991) replicated Fantz’s face
preferences in newborns & showed babies will attend
to even a very stylized version of a face.

Developmental Psychology
 Stimuli
• Have the same
features
• Are equally complex
• Are both symmetrical

• They argue that humans are born with some understanding of

the structure of faces and a drive to attend to face-like stimuli =
‘CONSPEC’
• As visual and cortical systems mature, start to encode specific
faces and unique features (recognition) = ‘CONLERN’
 Social experiences and perceptual
development
• Visual perception – social experiences direct infant attention and scaffold
infant expectations + cultural differences in the perception of illusions
• Face perception – born with a preference for face-like stimuli. Biological
maturation and social interaction support development of a qualitatively-
different, gestalt processing method.
• Auditory perception – we are biologically prepared at birth to acquire any
language but swiftly tune into the auditory regularities of our native
language (phonemes, cadence). (Also discriminate musicality and labels
from 6 months)
• Taste – early food preferences based on exposure in the womb

Developmental Psychology
 Summary - Learning points
• The A-not-B error is very common among babies aged 8-10 months. This error is explained in different ways by
different theoretical perspectives that reflect their different opinions on whether mental representation is an
inborn capacity or is learned.
• Empiricist-nativist perspectives apply to areas of perceptual development beyond object perception (e.g. face
perception)
• Empiricist-nativist perspectives apply to areas of perceptual development beyond vision (e.g. language
development)
• Learning can occur via a variety of different pathways, including getting worse before it gets better

Developmental Psychology
 References
• Baillargeon, R., Spelke, E. & Wasserman, S. (1985) Object permanence in 5-month-olds
infants. Cognition, 20, 191-208.
• Butterworth, G.E. Object disappearance and error in Piaget's Stage IV task Journal of
Experimental Child Psychology, 23 (1977), pp. 391-401
• Cuevas, K. & Bell, M.A. (2010) Developmental progression of looking and reaching
performance on the A-not-B task. Developmental Psychology, 45:1363-1371.
• deHaan, M., Pascalis, O., & Johnson, M.H. (2002) Specialization of neural mechanisms
underlying face recognition in human infants. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14: 199-209.
• Diamond, A. & Goldman-Rakic, P.S. (1989) Comparison of human infants and rhesus monkeys
on Piaget’s AB task: evidence for dependence on dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Experimental
Brain Research, 74: 24-40.
• Fantz, R. (1961) The origin of form perception. Scientific American, 204, 66-72.

Developmental Psychology
 References
• deHaan, M., Johnson, M.H., Maurer, D. & Perrett, D.I. (2001) Cognitive
Development, 16, 659
• Munakata, Y. (1998) Infant perseveration and implications for object permanence
theories: A PDP model of the AB task. Developmental Science, 1:161-211.
• Pascalis, O., deHaan, M. & Nelson, C. (2002) Is face processing species-specific
during the first year of life? Science, 296, 1321-1323
• Slater, A., Morison, V., & Rose, D. (1983) Perception of shape by the new-born
baby. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1: 135-142
• Topal, J., Gergely, G., Miklosi, A., Erdihegyi, A., & Csibra, G. (2008) Infants’
perseverative search errors are induced by pragmatic misinterpretation. Science,
321: 1831-1834

Developmental Psychology
 Additional materials
• http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/cla/psychology.bho/20107/gjersoe-n.pdf This is a chapter I wrote that
summarises some of the work on developing understanding of solidity which makes a nice case-study
for the performance-competence debate to put it into context. Interestingly, although infants seem to
have quite sophisticated expectations about solidity when measured on looking-time tests, older
children do not consistently use this knowledge to guide their behaviour. Here I discuss why.
• https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2016/sep/19/the-thatcher-illusion-are-faces-s
pecial
The short blogpost explaining the Thatcher illusion
• Core text book Shaeffer & Kipp – Chapter 4, Sensation & Perception
• https://www2.vobs.at/ludescher/Ludescher/LAcquisition/Nativist/nativist%20theory.htm Brief
summary of nativist theory with language acquisition as an example
• http://perception.yale.edu/papers/99-Scholl-Leslie-Chapter.pdf This is a great chapter that brings
together research on infant perception and adult cognition and tries to explain both using the same
mechanisms. It shows how studying developmental psychology can inform our understanding of
human psychology more broadly.
Developmental Psychology
 Some additional content on
early sensory capacities – we won’t have time to include this
in the LOILs but I add it here in case you are interested

Developmental Psychology
 What can newborns hear?
•A sound has to be louder for an infant to hear it and they
are more likely to hear higher pitch sounds than lower
pitch sounds
•At around 2 years hearing has developed to adult
standards

•Babies prefer music as opposed to non-melodic sound

•Newborns have a preference for their mother’s voice.
•This preference must have been learned in the womb.

Developmental Psychology
 What can newborns taste?
• Universal newborn preference for
sweetness
• Some newborns already share preferences
with their mother. Manella & colleagues
(2001) found preferences for carrot-
flavoured food whose mothers drank
carrot-juice during their 3rd trimester!
• Can this explain early cultural
preferences?

Developmental Psychology
 What can newborns smell?

•Newborns prefer the smell of their own

mother’s milk over their own mother’s
amniotic fluid.
•Mothers prefer the smell of their own
babies.
•Over the first few weeks newborns will start
to orient towards a breast that is lactating
Hudsen & Distel (1999)

Developmental Psychology
 What can newborns feel?
•Preterm babies (less than 37 weeks) about 12% of
births in the West. Often associated with low birth-
weight (less than 2500g).
•Associated with poor developmental outcomes.

•Field et al (1986) – 31-47% greater increase in

weight gain following 3 15-minute massages a day
for 5-10 days compared to a control group without
intervention.

Developmental Psychology
 Early sensory preferences
• Vision Human faces from birth – orientation &
smiling
• Hearing Human voices esp. mother – orientation
& smiling
• Taste Sweetness & milk – produces lip smacking &
smiling
• SmellMother’s lactation – root towards milk &
smiling
• Touch Premature babies thrive with caressing
Developmental Psychology