Memory and Perception in Infancy

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Memory and Perception in Infancy
Steve Croker Room C009 Ext. 2081 s.croker_at_derby.ac
.uk
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Outline

• Early theories of infant development
• suggested infants have limited abilities
• Piaget - most famous advocate of this view
• Research mostly contradicts Piaget
• memory research
• perception research
• Conclusion

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Theories of infant development

• Early ideas - infant incompetent
• William James blooming and buzzing confusion
• John Locke tabula rasa
• Piagets theory
• infants live in the world of the present
• very young infants have no mental representations
• therefore, they have no memory cannot make much
  sense of their perceptions

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Can young infants remember? (1)

• Infantile amnesia
• Rovee-Collier (1993)
• 2 months olds can remember for a day
• 3 month olds can remember for a week
• 6 month olds can remember for 2 weeks
• BUT
• very context sensitive

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Can young infants remember? (2)

• Diamond (1985)
• 8 month old infants
• delay of 1 or 2 seconds - would remember
• delay of 5 seconds - would forget
• as infants age, delay has to be longer to produce
  the error

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Can young infants use memory strategies? (1)

• Rehearsal
• consciously repeating information to ensure it
  stays in memory
• Flavell et al 1966
• 10 of 5 year olds rehearsed
• 60 of 6 year olds rehearsed
• 85 of 10 year olds rehearsed
• Can train rehearsal in 5 year olds
• Crude rehearsal found in 18 month olds

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Can young infants use memory strategies? (2)

• Clustering
• grouping items into semantic categories
• Sodian, Schneider Perlmutter (1986)
• 4 year olds can be trained to cluster
• 6 year olds cluster spontaneously
• 2 year olds can be trained to cluster in a
  primitive form

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What are infants perceptual abilities?

• Visual perception
• Preferential looking technique
• Acuity newborns have 20/400 vision
• But can focus both eyes
• Can follow movement
• Prefer faces by 2 months
• Prefer familiar to unfamiliar faces by 3 months

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Haiths theory of visual perception

• Haith (1980) suggests infants guided by rules
• 1. If awake and alert, open your eyes
• 2. If you find darkness, then search the
  environment
• 3. If you find light but no edges, then engage in
  a broad uncontrolled search of the environment
• 4. If you find an edge, then look near the edge
  and try to cross it
• 5. Stay near areas that have lots of contour
  scan broadly near areas of low contour and
  narrowly near areas of high contour

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Auditory Perception

• Conditioned head rotation or sucking procedure
• Abilities at birth
• Volume - 20dBs at softest
• Cant hear short sounds
• Prefer high pitched to low pitched sounds
• Prefer sounds made of more than one note
• I.E. PREFER FEMALE VOICES
• Newborns prefer to hear the sounds they heard in
  the womb
• Prefer mothers voice within 3 days of birth

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Object Constancy (1)

• Size constancy
• the ability to distinguish big/small things from
  near/far things
• begins at about age 5 and a half months
• Arterberry, Yonas Bensen, 1989
• Shape constancy
• the ability to perceive that the shape of an
  object remains constant though the shape
  projected on the retina changes
• develops at 12weeks
• Caron, Caron Carlson, (1979)

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Object Constancy (2)

• Position constancy
• the ability to know that, when youre moving,
  other objects stay stationary, despite the fact
  that the image these objects project on the
  retina is moving
• develops at about 6 months
• not fully developed until about 10-15 months

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Depth Perception

• The ability to distinguish between near and far
  objects
• Gibson Walk (1960) The visual cliff
• 6 month old babies show depth perception
• Campos, Langer Krowitz (1970)
• 2 month old babies show depth perception

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Inter-modal perception

• Coordination of sensory information from
  different modalities
• sight and sound coordination by 4 months
• sight and touch by 9 months

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Conclusion

• Infants have very early memory and perceptual
  abilities
• memory
• infantile amnesia does not exist
• young children can develop memory strategies
• perception
• infants have a range of abilities from very early
  on (sometimes from birth)
• Piaget underestimated their abilities

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Learning Outcomes

• Understand and be able to describe the memory
  abilities of infants
• Know how memory develops and be able to evaluate
  the research
• Understand the development of perception in
  infants
• Be able to apply your knowledge to evaluate
  Piagets theory of infant development