Visual Perception And Cognition In Infancy

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 aim of this book is both to reflect current knowledge of perceptual development and to point to some of the many questions that remain unanswered. The study of perceptual development is now a sophisticated science. The majority of the chapters tell a fascinating detective story: the way in which infants perceive and understand the world as they develop. Each of the major sections is prefaced by introductory comments, and the book will be useful for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers, and other professionals who have an interest in early perceptual development and in infancy in general.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Originally published in 1981, this volume represents the edited proceedings of the third symposium on eye movements and behaviour sponsored by the US Army Human Engineering Laboratory. The conference, titled "The Last Whole Earth Eye Movement Conference" was held in Florida in February 1980. As the conference approached, seizure of the American hostages by the Iranian militants, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the uncertain economic outlook around the world made it appear as though the title was a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the meeting proved highly successful and people throughout the world seemed to be adapting to the stresses of international tension, making the possibility of subsequent meetings more likely. The present volume is intended to serve as a complementary text to the earlier texts Eye Movements and Psychological Processes (Monty & Senders, 1976) and Eye Movements and the Higher Psychological Functions (Senders, Fisher & Monty, 1978), rather than a revision and update of them.