Infant eye tracking is jerky saccade and while that s good because it lets them get lots of visual information it s also a very disorganized way to view the world Their motor development affects their perception and vice versa so when they try to grab things they often overshoot and miss Infants are born legally blind with visual acuity how well they see of only 20 400 Children cannot see in 3D until 6 months of age until they start crawling Their 3D perception of the world is because of 4 things 1 Retinal disparity what each eye sees is a little different and the amount of disparity between two images is used as a cue for distance Some kids have difficulty with this which is a condition we call strabismus lazy eye 2 Occlusion A fancy term for when things are blocked from view 3 Texture gradient Babies often confuse texture with what an object actually is For example children don t like walking on glass or transparent objects because they think they re going to fall right through He demonstrated this with the visual cliff a type of crib that was made partially of glass and looked like a cliff The babies avoided this cliff but walked on the rest of the crib no problem a They can use cues from texture gradient to tell when something is close or far away 4 Relative size Auditory threshold minimum amount of sound someone can register is higher for newborns and infants than adults Meaning that their hearing isn t as well However whatever pitch they hear better is based on the pitch of their mother The auditory brainstem response refers to the neurons of the brain stem that fire when they pick up a sound Habituation is a measure of how quickly babies get bored by the same stimulus over and over again Often used as an IQ test for babies Sensory integration is when we combine multiple pieces of sensory information mainly sight sound Intersensory redundancy is good because it shows that we are registering and combining the same information over and over again If something visual is moving with sound it literally helps you hear better Smell and taste are quite sensitive from a young age Sweet tooth often develops because sugars are so high calorie so infants naturally like them more Touch is even more sensitive than most adults with infants feeling higher pain from shots Touch wise topical anesthesia works if we rub the area it won t hurt as much when we Babies aren t good multi taskers so if we give children sweets it takes their attention off give it a shot the pain Babies perception functions as a result of how they interact with the world Our sense of balance comes from vestibular system We know where limbs are which is a sixth sense called proprioception kinesthetic sense Dynamic systems theory says that the connection between action and perception is all about developing skills and then using them together Gross motor development moving the whole body Fine motor development moving individual digits very random at first but gets better Orienting system notices changes in the environment Focus system blocks out environmental stimulus Quick Review Vision is by far the worst of the senses after birth Infant hear well but not as good as adults Auditory threshold higher in newborns lower in children best for human voice pitches Infant hearing is like you with a bad cold Smell is better than adults Can taste apparently everything more sensitive than adults Same nerves as adults but it hurts more anyways Differentiation of component skills and then integrating them