Perceptual Development

Dr. Sara Yousef Elsebahy

Perception is the interpretation, organization and re exploration of the

information obtained either internal or external sources .

It can also be defined as the organization and interpretation of the

stimulus patterns in the environment .

 Perception as a cognitive process is the understanding and

interpretation of the stimuli received by eyes, ears, and other

receivers from the environment.

Infants and children acquire knowledge of the world around them

and it operations through the sensations they receive from sensory

stimuli. Development of infants or toddlers to a large extent is

determined by access to sensory information in the environment.

FACTORS AFFECTING PERCEPTION

Internal Factors: physiologic or psychologic factors. These are the

factors such as emotions, needs, mental attitudes, readiness, and

inculcations

External Factors: Physiological or social external factors affect

perceptions. Both the environment where object and event are

present and the environment in which the perceiving person is

 Perceptual development is in close relationship with the wealthy

of stimuli. Interaction, communication, experiment, and power

of discrimination may have a positive effect on the

development of perception
PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY

Perceptual development occurs as infants explore, manipulate and

identify different features in the environment, discovering

properties of and relationships between features. In fact, development of

language in children is the result of these sensory experiences that

contribute to cognitive growth and development.

 From the very moment of birth, infants enter into a process of learning how

to interact with their environment. This interaction process perceptual

aspect as well as having a physiological aspect. When development is

observed from the perspective of a dynamic system, is has been stated that

perceptual and motor development are inseparable. According to Piaget;

motor reactions such as holding, pulling, turning are among an infant’s ways

of learning, and in this period the infant does not learn through thinking or

searching for a reason. Infants learn by seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting,

and touching.
 For infants who are developing typically, the brain circuits and neural

pathways that form during the first year allow in the child to anticipate of

mother’s entry into a room upon hearing her voice or footsteps

approaching while awakening from a nap.

 Infants’ brains release endorphins during the experience of nurturing skin

to skin touch thus soothing anxiety when tired or stressed. Every time

babies experience new stimuli, their brains are fine-tuned to quickly

interpret and process similar experiences.

 During the first three months of life, infants’ brains respond to the world of sensation

with greater electrical activity in areas of the brain responsible for coding stimuli of

sights, sounds, and touches

 For example, babies learn that father’s entry into the home suggests that he can

anticipate touches and hugs. Such experiences provide the foundation for

interpreting and making sense of the world. For infants and toddlers who are

deaf/hard of hearing, the extent of hearing loss and/or amplification determines

whether they rely primarily on hearing or vision, or combined input from both

modalities to interpret their environment and gain understanding in the world

around them
 Along with the birth of an infant, the sense organs which has important

functions transmits the messages that they receive by means of stimuli to

the neural system. With the help of the neural system, the stimuli gains

meaning and by this way, infants understanding of the world are

facilitated. In the process of perception, every sense that reaches to the

sense organs is important. However, if they need be sequenced based

on their importance,t he sequence would be sight, hearing, touch and

other senses (Sökezoğlu, 2003). The senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste,

and smell which help the infant to perceive the world

 Sense of Sight
 sense of sight is the most powerful and effective compared to other
senses. In their first year of life, infants learn by the sense of sight to a
98% amount. Eye enables the perception of color, light, position,
movement, perspective and such senses

 the beams of light that come to eye reaches to the retina and
transferred to the related neural center of the sensory area in cortex.
The response of a newborn to this situation is simple; if the light is dim
the pupil enlarges, and if the light is shiny then the pupil shrinks and
some parts of the stimulus becomes unclear
 Visual stimulus provides a good deal of information to the organism about

the environment

 The newborn infants are born with open eye and the ability to see while

their eyes are sensitive to the light

 Newborns can clearly see the objects from a distance of 20-25 cm, and

their visual sharpness rapidly develops and in this way

 The prerequisite of seeing through two eyes, fixation and scanning

are the two eye sight in infants. Seeing through two eyes requires

incorporation of both eyes for a stable object (fixation) or a moving

object

 . Finally, the ability to detect the direction of movement and

velocity of object motion emerges by the infant’s third month of life.

 An infant's vision is not fully developed at birth and is a little blurry.

Infants' eyes don't track right when they are first born, but within that first

month, their eye movement begins to strengthen. They can distinguish

light from dark at birth. They find that the human face is the most

interesting object for them to look at. So when you're holding a baby, hold

them in that natural position as if a mother was nursing where they are in

close proximity to your face. Let the baby begin to look at your face,

explore it, and touch it.

 Infants from birth to three months begin to track objects. Help them do this by

placing objects in their view. One way to do this is during tummy time, to help

them focus on one object and move it slowly from side to side. This

is crossing the midline so the muscles in their eyes can become stronger.

 Through growth and maturation, they begin to use their vision to begin to

differentiate sets and subsets of objects. Also, think about how the

environment visually appears to a child. Think about placing children where

there's no glare and where they are not right under fluorescent lighting, which

overstimulates the brain.

The Depth Perception: The depth perception is the ability to see the world in three
dimensions and some of the objects closer while some others further. The depth
perception occurs approximately at the end of the third month. It gradually
matures at the sixth month.
Shape Perception: Shape perception is the ability to notice the shapes and
discriminate among different patterns. It has been found out that a newborn in a dark
room looked at the shadows and faces. It has been reported that newborns reacted
only to vertical surfaces with high contrast.
Color Perception: It has been found that infants can see certain colors even in their first
week, and the sight of color develops very quickly as aspects of the visual system.
Infants can discriminate yellow, orange, red, and green from gray when they were
born, and when they are four months old, they can see every color that an adult can
see
 Sense of Hearing

 Sense of hearing is investigated under four categories as;

 auditory discrimination, finding the source of sound, auditory sequencing, and

auditory memory.

 Auditory discrimination is the ability to discriminate the variations among sounds.

Finding the source of sound is the ability to relate the sound and its source.

 Auditory sequencing is the ability to understand and recall the order of words.

Difficulties with auditory sequencing may include confusing numbers like 93

for 39 and confusing lists and sequences. For example, a child with auditory
sequencing problems may not be able to complete a series of tasks in the
right order
 . Auditory memory includes storing the sounds heard during an incident in the

memory and the previous incidents. After a while when the same sound is

encountered, this information is used for the new situation

 infants who can hear the sounds before birth

 In order to investigate the hearing ability of fetus the pregnant women were
requested to read “TheCat in the Hat” story loudly two times a day in the last
six weeks of the pregnancy period.

 After birth, the infants were studied to find out if they recognized the story or
not. Infants sucked their pacifiers at any pace that they preferred while
listening to the stories playing on a cassette player, they were found that they
changed their pace in no other story but “The Cat in the Hat”.

 It is indicated that a newborn can differentiate between his/her mother’s voice

and other women’s voice, this preference is influential in the formation of
mother-infant connection
 A newborn starts hearing from the moment when amniotic fluid
first drops and can differentiate between different kinds of
sounds .

 When a tuning fork is hit near a newborn infant they were

observed as blinking; during the low frequency and rhythmic
sounds their heartbeats and breaths slowed, and infants were
observed as calmed down.
 It has been observed that infants can differentiate between high or low
pitched and noisy or low noised sounds; cry more when they hear the
sound of crying, and show reactions towards sudden sounds.

 It is indicated that a newborn can show startle response towards sudden

noisy sounds such as fast door shut, and they are more sensitive towards
certain sounds. Similarly, it is indicated that infants can determine the
direction where the sound comes through their head and eye movements,
they can search and watch for the source of the sound, listen to a sound
through differentiating it from other sounds as early as the first five months,
and their proficiencies towards the sense of hearing increased in a fast
way throughout their infancy period
 Touch is the very basis of interaction between parents and the child.
Touching promotes early physical growth and also plays vital role in
emotional development.

 Therefore sensitivity to touch is present at the time of birth. Newborn

babies react to touch particularly on palm, around mouth and in the soles
of feet.

 Sense of touch is investigated under two groups as touch identification,

and touch matching
 Touch identification is the identification of objects taking into

account of their features such as shape, dimension, hardness,

softness. Touch matching is recognizing the similarities of objects by

touch. Matching is conducted based on such features of objects as

shape, dimension, hard-soft, rough-smooth, hairy-hairless. At the

concrete operations period and in the visually impaired children the

sense of touch is used more effectively

 The sense of touch is as important as other organs in the processes of
experience formation, physical recognition of objects, sensing these
objects, and attributing meaning to these objects

 As the children grow, they take the objects to their mouth, taste with their
tongue, and then take it out and look carefully. In the middle of the first
year after these movements towards investigation the hand and mouth
coordination is more sharpened. Later taking objects to mouth are
decrease and touching them increase, these touches turn into rotation,
poke, and feeling the surface
 Sense of Taste Every infant come to the world with the ability to use the

sense of taste. Facial expressions are used to determine these tastes.

When they encounter to something sweet they relax their face muscles,

when it is sour they constrict their face, and they tighten their mouth

when it is hot. Infants are observed to be preferring most of the tastes

that adults like (Morris, 2002a). Newborns react by preferring sweet to

sour and sour tohot

 It is stated that all other tastes are the result of the combination of these

four tastes; the front part of the tongue is more sensitive to sweet and salty

tastes, the back part is more sensitive to hot, and the sides are more

sensitive to sour taste. However, it is indicated that all areas on the tongue

can to some extent discriminate the four tastes, while the middle part of

the tongue does not react to any taste.

Sense of Smell

Sense of smell is a primitive system that is formed during early

development. Newborns have the ability to distinguish the

smells. While measuring the olfactory ability of infants, pieces of

cotton on which different smells were rubbed approached to

them, and their heartbeats and breath rates were recorded.

Typically,
 if the smell was nice the infants turned their heads towards the

cotton, their heartbeats and breath rates slowed. On the other

hand, when the smell was bad the infants turned the other side

and heart beat and breath rates speeded up

 It has been found out that on newborns the smell their mothers’
amniotic fluid has more relaxing affect than other mothers’. Infants
are given to their mothers right after birth (after 1 hour) and they were
enabled to suck their mothers’ breasts and later one of the breasts of
their mothers were washed. It was revealed that the infants preferred
the breast that is not washed
 It has been found out that smell sensitivity is gender dependent, and

females have a better sense of smell than males. Additionally, age is

also an important factor in terms of determining and recognizing

ability for smells. The ability to smell is generally sharpest in early

adulthood years
 • SUPPORTING SENSORY DEVELOPMENT IN INFANTS

 Infancy period is full of developmental building blocks. The infancy

period of human life includes first breath, first smile, first thoughts, first

words, and first steps. Starting from the prenatal period adults’

stimulation of infants senses has critical importance in terms of their life

experiences and developments

 •A newborn uses his/her senses in order to learn the world and this
situation varies in each infant. An infant who comes with the ability to use
his/her senses and being ready to interact uses sounds, facial expressions,
and movements in order to convey his/her needs. Every infant can show
different reactions towards noise or a sudden change in light. Infants
develop with an idiosyncratic pace in their own cultural and social
environments..
 Thus, adults’ knowing about the development of senses and having a
high awareness on how to stimulate different senses will directly affect
the development process of infants (Ataman, 2004; Sağlamve Aral,
2013). It will be easier for persons who know the characteristics of sense
to support the physical, motor, cognitive, language, social, and
affective developments

 Many toddlers start to walk around 9 to 15 months of age. Those first

steps are possible because of changes that have taken place in the
brain and the spinal cord.