Musical Enculturation: How Young Listeners Construct Musical Knowledge through Perceptual Experience

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1 University Press Scholarship Online You are looking at 1-9 of 9 items for: keywords : infant perception Musical Enculturation: How Young Listeners Construct Musical Knowledge through Perceptual Experience Erin E. Hannon in Neoconstructivism: The New Science of Cognitive Development Published in print: 2009 Published Online: February 2010 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ This chapter explores the question of how infants and children build musical representations, with particular focus on perception, and knowledge of temporal structure in music, such as rhythm and meter. It reviews published and new evidence that infants can perceive rhythm and meter by attending to the same statistical properties that underlie adults' perception, that representations of rhythm and meter undergo reorganization as a result of culture-specific perceptual experience, and that infants and adults share some basic temporal processing constraints despite infants' initial flexibility. In addition to examining development of music-specific knowledge, a parallel goal is to understand the emergence of domain-specific representations in auditory cognition. If we assume that early representations of music are primarily domain-general and become culture-specific through perceptual experience, then a question of great interest is whether overlapping structures are present and detected in the musical and linguistic input available to infants and children. The chapter briefly reviews some new evidence suggesting that this is may be the case. A Bottom-up Approach to Infant Perception and Cognition: A Summary of Evidence and Discussion of Issues Leslie B. Cohen in Neoconstructivism: The New Science of Cognitive Development Published in print: 2009 Published Online: February 2010 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ Page 1 of 6

2 This chapter presents a bottom-up approach to infant perception and cognition. It provides evidence from topics ranging from infant angle perception to infant categorization and early word learning that a constructivist, building block type of system seems to capture much of the acquisition process. The system, which is domain-general and occurs at many different ages, uses correlational, conditional, and perhaps other types of relations to construct higher-order units from combinations of lower-order units. Even though this system describes how changes may occur in many aspects of infant perception and cognition, it still is only a description of behavior and behavioral change. A more complete explanation requires models that are explicit about the mechanisms underlying that change. Connectionist models may be one vehicle for doing that, but most of the ones designed so far for infant perception and cognition are limited to a single area of application and do not deal adequately with underlying and repeated developmental changes. The models are a good first step, however, and they do highlight an interesting and important issue. Fundamentally, they are models of learning, some that do require feedback and others that just selforganize from the inputs they receive. But they do raise the issue of similarities and differences between mechanisms underlying learning and mechanisms underlying development. Perceptual Completion in Infancy Scott P. Johnson in Neoconstructivism: The New Science of Cognitive Development Published in print: 2009 Published Online: February 2010 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ This chapter describes a set of object perception skills that develop early in infancy, focusing on three ways in which observers fill in the gaps in perception imposed by occlusion: spatial completion, spatiotemporal completion, and 3D object completion. It describes experiments designed to examine developmental mechanisms of perceptual completion in infants. The best evidence to date suggests that newborn infants do not fill in the gaps in perception, and therefore do not perceive objects as do adults. Instead, the visual world of neonates seems to consist solely of surface fragments that have no substance, volume, or continuity. Infants initially appear to process complex stimuli as simple isolated units, and subsequently integrate them into higher-order patterns. Page 2 of 6

3 A Constructivist View of Object Perception in Infancy Scott P. Johnson in Infant Perception and Cognition: Recent Advances, Emerging Theories, and Future Directions January 2011 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ This chapter describes a body of research whose goal is to understand and explain the development of object perception in infancy. First, it presents a picture of object perception as a psychological construct, and how it might be decomposable into tasks amenable to empirical investigation in infancy. Second, it describes several theoretical accounts that inform questions of infants' object perception. Third, it summarizes recent research that has examined in detail the mechanisms of active assembly. Finally, the chapter considers the state of our knowledge of infants' object perception in light of recent advances in modeling, and discusses briefly the bigger picture, asking in particular what remains to be determined. The Role of Perceptual Processes in Infant Addition/Subtraction Experiments Alan M. Slater, J. Gavin Bremner, Scott P. Johnson, and Rachel A. Hayes in Infant Perception and Cognition: Recent Advances, Emerging Theories, and Future Directions January 2011 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ One of the major areas of research into early cognitive development concerns infants' ability to understand number, given that it leads into later numerical and mathematical competence. Accordingly, there is considerable research on this topic and there is a large body of research suggesting that infants have a least some ability to discriminate between small number sets and large number sets. This chapter begins by describing the evidence for two types of representations of number one for small item sets, the other for large together with evidence that these systems are modality-general. This is followed by evidence suggesting that infants may sometimes be responding to continuous variables that are found in displays of discrete items rather than number per se. It then turns to the main focus of the chapter, which Page 3 of 6

4 is whether infants can add and subtract, or whether their purported arithmetical abilities can be explained in lower-level perceptual terms. It is in this context that the relative contributions of informationprocessing perspectives are compared with other theoretical views on our understanding of infants' numerical abilities. Infant Perception and Cognition: Recent Advances, Emerging Theories, and Future Directions Lisa Oakes, Cara Cashon, Marianella Casasola, and David Rakison (eds) January 2011 ISBN: eisbn: Item type: book acprof:oso/ The cognitive revolution in the 1950s and 1960s led researchers to view the human mind like a computer an information-processing system that encodes, represents, and stores information and is constrained by limits on hardware (the brain) and software (learning strategies and rules). The emergence of new behavioral, computational, and neuroscience methodologies, has deeply expanded psychologists' understanding of the workings of the infant, child, and adult mind. One result is that research has focused on the mechanisms of change, over developmental time, in the information-processing mind. This book brings together the recent findings and theories about the origins and early development of the information-processing mind, and provides insight into the future directions in the study of infant perception and cognition. The contributions represent a wide-range of research area in the study of infant perception and cognition, which emphasize the use of diverse methodological techniques to address key questions about development. The chapters demonstrate how the combination of historical perspectives on the information-processing approach to cognition and recent advances in behavioral, computational, and neuroscience approaches to cognition has contributed to our understanding of how abilities ranging from visual attention to face processing to object categorization have developed during infancy. Across this broad range of topics, it is clear that much of our modern understanding of infant perceptual and cognitive development emerges from the foundation of classic information-processing models of development, such as that of Leslie B. Cohen (1991). The recent advances illustrated in this book show how researchers have built on this foundation to uncover the mechanisms that drive developmental change. Page 4 of 6

5 Human Action Perception across Development Jeff Loucks and Jessica Sommerville in Social Perception: Detection and Interpretation of Animacy, Agency, and Intention Published in print: 2013 Published Online: May 2014 ISBN: eisbn: Publisher: The MIT Press DOI: / mitpress/ What do we pay attention to when we view other people s actions? How does such attention change over the course of development? In this chapter, we will discuss developmental changes in infants attention during action perception changes that shift their attention from being initially undifferentiated to being selectively focused. This perceptual tuning process is tied to infants development of motor abilities and also supports a functional analysis of other people s behavior. Importantly, attention during action perception following the tuning is not rigid and fixed, but is instead selective and flexible. These attributes aid in predicting other people s actions and action outcomes, thereby increasing the power and efficiency of action perception for infants broader social-cognitive development. Developmental perspectives on phonological typology and sound change Chandan Narayan in Origins of Sound Change: Approaches to Phonologization Published in print: 2013 Published Online: May 2013 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ This chapter presents a survey of work addressing developmental processes and the nature of phonological systems and change. In discussing the relationship between infant speech perception and phonological typology, it is argued that the types of phonetic contrasts that infants fail to discriminate are those that are rare in the world's sound systems, which is in part due to their fragile acoustic-perceptual salience. The chapter then turns to recent research into the fine-grained phonetics of infant-directed speech in English, which shows acoustic conditions similar to those targeted in well-known sound changes in the world's languages, suggesting that the ambient language input to infants has the potential to provide the seeds of phonological change. Page 5 of 6

6 Thinking in Movement: Further Analyses and Validations Maxine Sheets-Johnstone in Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science August 2013 ISBN: eisbn: Publisher: The MIT Press DOI: / mitpress/ This chapter discusses infant spatial perceptions and cognitions, and how they are intimately tied to movement and are constituted from the ground up by infants themselves even without instruction from anyone. Psychologists describe the fascination of infants and young children with insideness, i.e. with being in or inside, or with putting inside. As an example, the chapter presents a statement Piaget made in conjunction with one of his documented observations of a mouth gesture made by his sixteen-month-old daughter. This statement dramatically highlights both the phenomenon of thinking in movement and the alltoo-common oversight of it. Infant psychologist T. G. R. Bower, in the context of corroborating observations made by Piaget of his children, writes that Piaget s son was surely typical in finding the relation inside fascinating. Latter parts of the chapter point out an oversight on Piaget s part in making his statement. Page 6 of 6