Sensation & Perception: Perceptual Development

4 flashcards · Biology · by lakesare

1. Name 2 common ways to measure visual acuity in an infant.

   preferential looking visual evoked potential - electrical signals recorded from the scalp A question that works for infants is “Can you tell the difference between the stimulus on the left and the one on the right?” The way infants look at stimuli in their environment provides a way to determine whether they can tell the difference between two stimuli. In the preferential looking (PL) technique, two stimuli like the ones the infant is observing in Figure 16.1 are presented, and the experimenter…

2. What's spontaneous looking preferences?

   The reason preferential looking works is that infants have spontaneous looking preferences; that is, infants prefer to look at certain types of stimuli. For example, to measure visual acuity, we can use the fact that infants choose to look at objects with contours over ones that are homogeneous. Thus, when we present a grating with large bars and a gray field that reflects the same amount of light that the grating would reflect if the bars were spread evenly over the whole area, the infant can…

3. What's evoked potential?

   Electrical response recorded from some part of the brain following stimulus (e.g. light flash, pure tone). An evoked potential or evoked response is an electrical potential in a specific pattern recorded from a specific part of the nervous system, especially the brain, of a human or other animals following presentation of a stimulus such as a light flash or a pure tone.

4. What does VEP stand for?

   Visual Evoked Potential