Review Questions for Visual Development

These questions are for review purposes only. They will not necessarily be included on the exam, nor do they necessarily cover all material that may be examined. They are meant only to help you isolate areas in which you may need additional review.

1. What is the "preferential looking technique"? What assumptions is this technique based on? What can we determine about infants’ perception with this technique? Give an example of this technique and describe what can be concluded about infants’ perception using the example.
2. What is habituation? What is dishabituation? What can we learn using habituation and dishabituation over that of the preferential looking technique? Give an example of an habituation experient.
3. What is a baby’s visual acuity at birth? Describe two reasons why an infant has low acuity.
4. Compare a 1-month old infant’s contrast sensitivity to that of an adult. How is this thought to relate to a newborn’s supposed ability to visually recognize his or her mother?
5. Can infants perceive the same colors as adults? Give an example of how you go about testing this. At what age do we assume that infants perceive approximately the same colors as adults do?
6. At what age has it been determined that infants can perceive depth using binocular cues? How is this tested? What about the use of pictorial depth cues? Do they develop at the same rate as binocular cues?
7. Can newborns perceive motion? Can they follow moving objects smoothly with their eyes?
8. Describe the various ways in which development and experience can interact.
9. What is selective rearing? Give an example and briefly describe the conclusions that can be drawn from the example.
10. What is astigmatism? How is this disorder thought to affect neurons in the visual cortex? Briefly describe the results suggested to support these conclusions.
11. What is the oblique effect? Some say that humans living in large cities are experiencing a form of selective rearing in that we don’t encounter many oblique lines in our environment. Briefly describe the experiment discussed in class which was designed to examine this question. What conclusions were made from this experiment?