Infant Perception And Cognition

Marianella Casasola is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University, where she has been teaching since earning her doctorate in Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines aspects of infant spatial cognition, young children's acquisition of spatial language, and the interplay between language and cognition during the first two years of development.

The chapters in this book are based on papers presented at the 23rd Carnegie Mellon Symposia on Cognition. At this exciting event, speaker after speaker presented new discoveries about infants' visual perception in areas ranging from sensory processes to visual cognition. The field continues to make significant progress in understanding the infant's perceptual world. Several advances have come from the development of new methods for exploring infant perception and cognition that have brought new empirical findings. Advances have also been made in understanding the mechanisms underlying perceptual development. Outstanding examples of this ongoing progress can be seen in the chapters of this volume.

The developing infant can accomplish all important perceptual tasks that an adult can, albeit with less skill or precision. Through infant perception research, infant responses to experiences enable researchers to reveal perceptual competence, test hypotheses about processes, and infer neural mechanisms, and researchers are able to address age-old questions about perception and the origins of knowledge. In Development of Perception in Infancy: The Cradle of Knowledge Revisited, Martha E. Arterberry and Philip J. Kellman study the methods and data of scientific research on infant perception, introducing and analyzing topics (such as space, pattern, object, and motion perception) through philosophical, theoretical, and historical contexts. Infant perception research is placed in a philosophical context by addressing the abilities with which humans appear to be born, those that appear to emerge due to experience, and the interaction of the two. The theoretical perspective is informed by the ecological tradition, and from such a perspective the authors focus on the information available for perception, when it is used by the developing infant, the fit between infant capabilities and environmental demands, and the role of perceptual learning. Since the original publication of this book in 1998 (MIT), Arterberry and Kellman address in addition the mechanisms of change, placing the basic capacities of infants at different ages and exploring what it is that infants do with this information. Significantly, the authors feature the perceptual underpinnings of social and cognitive development, and consider two examples of atypical development - congenital cataracts and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Professionals and students alike will find this book a critical resource to understanding perception, cognitive development, social development, infancy, and developmental cognitive neuroscience, as research on the origins of perception has changed forever our conceptions of how human mental life begins.

Infant Perception: From Sensation to Cognition, Volume II: Perception of Space, Speech, and Sound covers comprehensive programmatic examinations, which are arranged along a continuum from basic sensory and neurophysiological functioning to information processing and memory. This volume is organized into two parts encompassing six chapters, and begins with the difficulties prior research has had in assessing infant perception of depth or space. The next chapters provide a link between infants' perception of space and their perception of objects and evaluate both psychometric studies of object concept development and studies focusing specifically on Piaget's theory. These topics are followed by discussions of the infant's development of the concept of self, and that concept is used to explain the infant's perception of other persons. The final chapters deal with the infant vision and audition. These chapters specifically describe the developmental anatomy of the auditory pathway and the electrophysiological functioning and capacity. A series of studies on the infant's receptiveness for the segmental units of speech, the ability to perceive phonemic feature contrasts, and the manner in which this perception occurs is also provided. This book will prove useful to developmental psychologists and biologists.

Research on the development of human infants has revealed remarkable capacities in recent years. Instead of stressing the limitations of the newborn, the modern approach is now more optimistically based on an assessment of the adaptive capabilities of the infant. Innate endowment, coupled with interaction with the physical and social environment, enables a developmental transition from processes deeply rooted in early perception and action to the cognitive and language abilities typical of the toddler.; This book reviews a number of issues in early human development. It includes a reconceptualization of the role of perception at the origins of development, a reconciliation of psychophysical and ecological approaches to early face perception, and building bridges between biological and psychological aspects of development in terms of brain structure and function. Topics covered include basic exploratory processes of early visual systems in early perception and action; face perception in newborns, species typical aspects of human communication, imitation, perception of the phonetic structure of speech, origins of the pointing gesture, handedness origins and development, theoretical contributions on perception and cognition, implicit and explicit knowledge in babies; sensory-motor coordination and cognition, information processing and cognition, perception, habituation and the development of intelligence from infancy.

In this comprehensive treatment of infant perception, Philip Kellman and Martha Arterberry bring together work at multiple levels to produce a new picture of perception's origins.

Infant Perception: From Sensation to Cognition, Volume I: Basic Visual Processes focuses on the study and programmatic investigations of infant perception, examining early sensory, perceptual, and cognitive systems. This book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 analyzes the major physiological and behavioral techniques used to measure infant vision. Each technique is critically evaluated in terms of the method employed, type of data that can be obtained, and anatomy of the visual system. The neuronal model to explain developmental changes and techniques used to assess infant visual preferences for patterns varying in amount of contour are discussed in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 demonstrates the value of the corneal reflection technique for the study of infant attention and visual scanning patterns, while Chapter 4 examines the developmental changes and individual differences in early pattern perception. The last chapter concentrates on the evidence of infant visual preferences for novelty and on the implications of such evidence for models of early recognition memory. This publication is a good reference for pediatricians and clinicians concerned with infant perception.