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.
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 Progress in Infancy Research Series is dedicated to the presentation of innovative and exciting research on infants, both human and animal. Each volume in the series is designed to stand alone and contains autonomous chapters which are based on high quality programs of research with infants. These chapters integrate the work of the authors with that of other experts working in the same or related areas. The authors wish to present high quality critical syntheses bearing on infant perception and sensation, learning and memory processes, and other aspects of development. This series will be a forum for the presentation of technological breakthroughs, methodological advances, and new integrations that might create platforms for future programmatic work on the complexities of infant behavior and development. Each volume in the series is dedicated to an outstanding investigator whose research has illuminated the nature of infant behavior and development, and whose contributions to the field have been of seminal importance.
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.
Infant Perception: From Sensation to Cognition, Volume II: Perception of Space, Speech, and Sound covers comprehensive programmatic examinations, which are arranged along a continuum from basic sensory and neurophysiological functioning to information processing and memory. This volume is organized into two parts encompassing six chapters, and begins with the difficulties prior research has had in assessing infant perception of depth or space. The next chapters provide a link between infants' perception of space and their perception of objects and evaluate both psychometric studies of object concept development and studies focusing specifically on Piaget's theory. These topics are followed by discussions of the infant's development of the concept of self, and that concept is used to explain the infant's perception of other persons. The final chapters deal with the infant vision and audition. These chapters specifically describe the developmental anatomy of the auditory pathway and the electrophysiological functioning and capacity. A series of studies on the infant's receptiveness for the segmental units of speech, the ability to perceive phonemic feature contrasts, and the manner in which this perception occurs is also provided. This book will prove useful to developmental psychologists and biologists.
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. 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.
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 book provides detailed up to date and authoritative accounts of major areas of infant development. The 11 chapters are subdivided into three sections: Perceptual Development (4 chapters); Cognitive Development (3 chapters); Social Interaction, Early Language and Emotion (4 chapters). While written by different contributors the book is a well?integrated account of current developments in our understanding of infant development. Integration of the chapters is assisted by the editors' linking sections which introduce each of the three major sections of the book. The book begins with an account of the development of basic visual functions in early infancy and of visual memory and perceptual capabilities of the infant. This is followed by recent research into infants' ability to detect and respond to events and encounters, a theme which emphasises the continuity of perceptual and cognitive development. Cognitive development is further pursued by an account of the complex area of object permanence, and the development of spatial awareness, and how infants learn to solve problems. In the final section early social and language development are explored. Infants learn language in a social context and the social structuring of infant cognition and language is next considered. The final chapter considers the role of emotion in infant development from a psychoanalytic perspective. The book presupposes no detailed knowledge of infancy on the part of the reader, but at the same time the reader is guided to an understanding of the topical and lively controversies that represent the current state of the art and which make the field of infant development such a lively and interesting area of study.lopment of spatial awareness, and how infants learn to solve problems. In the final section early social and language development are explored. Infants learn language in a social context and the social structuring of infant cognition and language is next considered. The final chapter considers the role of emotion in infant development from a psychoanalytic perspective. The book presupposes no detailed knowledge of infancy on the part of the reader, but at the same time the reader is guided to an understanding of the topical and lively controversies that represent the current state of the art and which make the field of infant development such a lively and interesting area of study.
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.
