Perceptual Development

Abstract

Infants' perceptual systems are the primary means to acquire and interpret knowledge about events, objects, and people in the world around them. This chapter begins with discussion of theories of perceptual development and its consequences for children's cognitive and social development. We then discuss neural foundations of perception and the emergence and maturation of sensory systems before and after birth, followed by detailed sections on audition, vision, and intermodal perception. Throughout, we focus on questions of how the developing child extracts meaningful information from the sensory array—that is, how the observer detects, synthesizes, and interprets sensory input so as to yield perception of structured events and objects—and how effects of experience on perceptual development interact with developmental timing and what has already been acquired. We focus also on developmental mechanisms—growth, experience, and learning—and we examine as well the malleability, or plasticity, of perceptual systems during development. The chapter concludes with discussion of how different theoretical views may be reconciled in light of the developing child in a wider context.

Electrophysiological Evidence for Interhemispheric Connectivity and Communication in Young Human Infants

“…The maturation of sensory systems tends to occur peripherally (at the sense organ) before it occurs centrally (in the brain). For example, the eye differentiates structurally and reaches functional maturity before the visual cortex does [ 87 ]. By the second trimester of gestation, however, the eye and visual system are essentially mature structurally, although their levels of functional competence lag behind [ 88 ], as vision is the least developed sense at birth.…”

Sciences of Observation

“…For human observers, categories are closely linked to, and commonly expressed in, language. Visual category learning is by far the best investigated; here, it is known that human infants can identify faces from birth [75], track moving objects by three months [85], and learn hundreds of initially-novel object categories by the onset of language use, approximately one year [76]. [86].…”

Early roots of information-seeking: Infants predict and generalize the value of information

“…The need to distil useful information from the environment is particularly evident when considering the experience infants have in their first year of life. Although infants' experience of the world is vastly different from our own, they also encounter a vast amount of novel input they have to make sense of (Johnson and Hannon, 2015 ). To do so, they have to learn to detect relevant stimuli amidst a constant stream of multisensory input (Hunnius, 2022 ).…”