Showing papers in "Developmental Psychology in 1980"

Development of face recognition: A maturational component?

Abstract: In these studies we assessed development between ages 6 and 16 of the ability to encode unfamiliar faces. Performance improved markedly between ages 6 and 10 and then remained at a fixed level or actually declined for several years, finally improving again by age 16. Evidence is provided that this distinctive developmental course reflects, in part, acquisition of processes specific to the encoding effaces rather than general pattern encoding or metamemorial skills. The possibility that maturational factors contribute to the developmental course efface recognition is raised, and two sources of data relevant to assessing this possibility are discussed. Normal adults have a prodigious capacity for making new faces familiar. Whether one's high school class contained 90 or 800 people, approximately 90% of those classmates are recognized 35 years after graduation (Bahrick, Bahrick, & Wittlinger, 1975). Less dramatically, laboratory studies have shown that very brief exposure to previously unfamiliar faces permits subjects to distinguish those faces from new ones at a later time. The level of performance remains high across inspection sets that range in size from 20 to 72 (Bower & Karlin, 1974; Galper, 1970; Hochberg & Galper, 1967; Yarmey, 1971; Yin, 1969; but also see Diamond & Carey, 1977, and Patterson & Baddeley,

Cross-modal equivalence in early infancy: Auditory–visual intensity matching.

Abstract: It has been proposed that young infants are attentive to quantitative variations in stimulation to the exclusion of qualitative ones. To the extent that this is so, young infants should ignore differences between lights and sounds and should instead respond to auditory and visual stimuli as more or less similar depending on their intensity. To examine this hypothesis, a cardia c habituation/dishabituation method with a test for stimulus generalization was employed . Three-weekold infants were repeatedly presented with white-light followed by white-noise stimuli of different intensities. A U-shaped relationship between magnitude of cardiac response and loudness was found. In view of previous findings that without prior visual stimulation a monotonic increase in cardiac response to the same range of auditory stimuli results, this finding of a significant quadratic relationship with loudness suggests that the infants were responding to the auditory stimuli in terms of their similarity to the previously presented visual stimulus. A separate group of infants presented with a more intense visual stimulus exhibited a shift in the intensity at which a minimal cardiac response occurred. Results of a study with adults did not show any systematic relationship between cardiac response and loudness, indicating that unlike infants, adults do not spontaneously make cross-modal matches of intensity. Our perception of the world is based to a

The young infant's ability to produce discrete emotion expressions.

Abstract: University of Delaware A series of five studies investigated the young infant's ability to produce identifiable emotion expressions as defined in differential emotions theory. Trained judges applied emotion-specific criteria in selecting expression stimuli from videotape recordings of 54 1- to 9-month-old infants' responses to a variety of incentive events, ranging from playful interactions to the pain of inoculations. Four samples of untrained subjects from two different populations confirmed the social validity of infants' emotion expressions by reliably identifying expressions of interest, joy, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, andjeaj;. Brief training resulted in significant increa'sesTin the accuracy of discriminatio n of infants' negative emotion expressions for low-accuracy subjects. Construct validity for the eight emotion expressions identified by untrained subjects and for a consistent pattern of facial responses to unanticipated pain was provided by expression identifications derived from an objective, theoretically structured, anatomically based facial movement coding system. There has been little systematic investigation of the infant's ability to encode or produce facial expressions of emotion, except for smiling and laughing (Emde, Gaensbauer, & Harmon, 1976; Spitz & Wolf, 1946; Sroufe & Wunsch, 1972). Investigations of the newborn (Emde et al., 1976; Peiper, 1963) and the born blind (Dumas, 1932; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1972; Goodenough, 1932; Thompson, 1941) have suggested that the expressions of startle, neonatal smiling, disgust, and distress are present at birth. Darwin's (1872, 1877) observational studies,

Development of social roles in elicited and spontaneous behavior during the preschool years.

Abstract: In two experiments, children between ll/2 and 7l/2 years of age were tested on a predicted, eight-step sequence of the development of social roles. Performance on this sequence was related to two measures of more spontaneous behavior. Nearly all children fit the predicted sequence perfectly. By 2 years of age, most children could make a doll act as an independent agent. The majority of 3-yearolds could make a doll carry out several behaviors fitting the role of doctor. At age 4 or 5, most children developed the capacity to show a social role, making a doctor doll interact with a patient doll. The intersection of social roles for two agents appeared at about age 6: A man doll could be both doctor and father to a patient who was also his daughter. In their spontaneous behavior, early preschoolers almost always showed the highest step that they were capable of, but beginning with the step for social roles, late preschoolers seldom showed their highest step. For children to act and feel socially competent, they need to understand roles such as mother, father, doctor, and patient. Despite the importance of these social roles in the child's life, the development of social roles in the preschool years is, at best, only

Parent–child interaction and the acquisition of lexical information during play.

Abstract: Individual play interactions of parents with their preschool-aged boys and girls were examined to determine the ways mothers and fathers provided and elicited lexical information about the names and functions of the parts of a complex toy car. Parents' and children's speech was analyzed for utterances that provided or requested the name (label) or purpose (function) of a car part and for nonlabeling utterances that mentioned the part (term). Analyses revealed significant contrasts between fathers and mothers in their interactive styles and in the amounts and kinds of lexical information they provided and elicited. Fathers' speech contained more different terms than did mothers', and more fathers than mothers described the functions of the car parts. Fathers were also more cognitively and linguistically demanding: More fathers than mothers requested labels and functions from their children. Children, in turn, produced more total vocabulary to fathers than to mothers. These parent-child interaction patterns suggest that fathers as well as mothers may exert an active influence on children's language development. The influence of parent-child interaction styles on young children's language and cognitive development has increasingly become a focus of research attention (ClarkeStewart, 1978; Gleason & Weintraub, 1978). After first establishing that mothers provide special modifications in their speech to young children (Snow, 1977), a number of researchers have attempted to distinguish those features of mothers' speech that may advance children's language acquisition. For example, Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1977) found a statistically significant positive relationship between the frequency of maternal labeling utterances (e.g., "That's an apple") and the size of children's vocabularies.

Children's recall of television material: Effects of presentation mode and adult labeling.

Abstract: Children from preschool, kindergarten, and Grades 3 and 4 viewed an edited prosocial cartoon in one of four viewing conditions that changed program features and introduced viewing information to aid subjects in recognizing and structuring central plot information. Children's recall of central and incidental program content was assessed. Older children recalled more total information; participants who had viewed with an adult experimenter recalled more material than did children in other viewing conditions. Visual presentation enhanced central recall.