Visual Short-Term Memory Capacity In Infants

INFANT LEARNING Infant learning and brain development is fragile and contingent upon numerous intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The most critical time frame for infant brain development is from the second trimester to the first three months of life (Marshall, 2011). During this time, neural pathways are forming, areas of the brain are maturing, and brain development is rapid. From infancy until the age of 3 years, neural pathways are still being formed in response to stimulation and for this reason, it is extremely important for caregivers and parents to be aware of the many factors that can influence brain development in infants (Marshall, 2011).

Introduction Memory is divided into three categories. These categories consist of: sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory, out of these short term memory is the main focus in this essay. It has been widely researched due to interest of how much memory can be stored, how long this memory can be stored for and what information is memorised.

An explanation of the impact of current research into development and learning of babies and young children.

How do we know infants can see at birth? They can’t tell us. For this we depend on clues such as eye movement, light sensitivity and the appearance of the eye. Though an infant 's vision is present at birth the strength of their vision is far from mature. However, vision develops rapidly in infants, going from only being able to focus on images 4 to 30 inches away to a rapid ability to see details and shape (Berger, 2014). By 3 months these same infants with immature ability can see patterns color and motion. Surveys and medical research are regularly used to develop a better understanding of infant development.

Improvements in memory also mark early childhood. Recognition memory, the ability to recognize familiar stimuli from unfamiliar stimuli is quite good, and in some cases, perfect. Recall, on the other hand, is not as proficient, and few children are able to generate an image of absent stimuli. This deficiency is often attributed to the in-effective use of memory strategies. Children do show the development of memory strategies, but usage is usually limited earlier on.

Hypothesis Infants that are three weeks old will be at the beginning stages of maturing s cones, which should enable them to begin viewing green and will in turn prefer the color green (longer gaze time) because it is new in their development of color. Independent variables of the study will be which color is shown to the infants.

Do babies get bored? Let’s find out. In this simple experiment, it will be seen how much a baby is interested in toys or objects. By counting how many seconds the infant stares at them can help reveal what is inside the baby’s mind as shown by the baby’s behavior in terms of staring at and then looking away from the toys. What is being observed in this experiment is the length of time the baby pays attention to a given toy before the baby looks away from the object. So the baby is introduced to certain toys several times until the baby gets used to or habituated to them. This simple experiment will tell us how the baby’s brain works and how this may affect the baby’s learning skills in the future.

Throughout the course of this semester, I have been surprised to see how much I have learned about the development of infants. When it comes to the object permanence, initially I did think it was of the short attention span that I thought infants had that contributed to them not searching for occluded object. This study showed that memory limitations are not the only factor in occlusions or partially occluded objects. It reminded me of other behaviors that we discussed in class such as habituation and dishabituation where habitation is presenting a stimulus to an infant and see how long it takes for them to get bored of it while dishabituation is when the infant is interested. From playing with my little cousins and volunteering at the Children’s

Review of The Credible Shrinking Room: Very Young Children's Performance With Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Relations This study is performed on 2.5 year olds, and tests their ability to use their knowledge of the location of a toy (Troll-doll named "Terry") in a room (tent-like, with various pieces of common household furniture) to draw deductions

Researchers have also investigated the development of working memory in infants. It has been established that working memory, that is, the ability to retain information in the brain increases with age. Infants aged five to seven months were found to be unable to retain more than three objects in their working memory. Fifty percent of infants aged twelve months had developed the capacity to retain more than three objects in their working memory. Studies have also indicated that at the age of six months, infants have the ability to memorize events. Infants, between the ages of 6 to 9 months have developed the cognitive ability to master object performance. Object performance refers to the ability of an infant to understand that objects do continue to exist even if out of sight. Development of object performance is also an indication that the infant has developed the ability of goal

1.5.1 Vision: Birth to Six Months an infant’s brain is not wired for sight at the time of birth. In the early days after birth most of time infants sleep. As they grow sleeping time reduces. The first six months of life is the period of developing vision. Keeping infants in a dark room or covering newborns eye’s, it is not feasible to recover their vision. Their sight may not develop normally. Once passed, this window of opportunity is not feasible to recover. After the birth newborn’s are examined, for cataract. If at all any cataract covering the lens of the eye is present, it needs to be removed. Vision is one sense that develops with little stimulation. Infants need interesting objects to look at, including toys and people.

Although infant perception differs in terms of acuity, infant perception on size and shape constancy requires less development. Adults understand that objects have a constant shape and size, regardless of their distance, and the angle of perception. The developmental question lies on whether size and shape principles guide infant perception, or whether constancies are developed through experience. This argument is one of many in exploring whether infants learn through cognitive adaptations, or whether they learn through experience and what the environment offers them. Previous assumptions by Piaget, state that these principles were not present at birth, but developed towards the end of the first year. This

Growing up we use our key senses to understand and live in the world around us. After birth newborns eyes are still developing and cannot make out fine details far away. Newborns vision is around 20/240, but by 6 months their vision clears up to around 20/40. At birth infants are genetically programmed to know who their mother is and by three months they can match voices with their gender and ethnic groups. Along with being better to distinguish voices, newborns sense of colors also enhances with age. Perceptual vision is very important for infant eye development. This is necessary because without this ability they would see an “object at a different distance or in a different orientation, they would perceive it as a different object” (Santrock 161). There are two main factors for this size constancy,

Sight baby care Unless vision impairment, babies can see from birth. However they may not be able to distinguish similar tones such as red and orange. Black and white are boldest of color contrasts and are some of the only colors newborn's can see. Black and white toys help develop their visual focus. Mobiles strengthen eye muscles and eye control. At the ages of two months and four months, colour differences become clearer. Mirrors are a great way for encouraging face recognition and for developing visual focus. Babies love human faces as a focal point, so these keep them entertained for quite awhile. Babies will use their eyes to take in enormous amounts of information about the world, which will then stimulate the brain development and will lead to physical accomplishments like sitting, rolling over, crawling, and walking.

Habituation is applied in discovering the perceptual systems which indicates that children advance earlier in developing perception compared to the acquiring the idea of the permanence of objects. Vision, hearing, smell and taste, language, touch, and pain are the early infant sensorimotor perceptual improvement in the infants’ mental growth. Motor development, required for the child to create relationships between vision, touch and