From: Ray Recchia (rrecchia@frontiernet.net)
Date: Wed 10 Sep 2003 - 00:41:47 GMT
Joe,
Those sound like a couple of reasonable experiments. You just need to find
someone to run them. There must be some psychologists out there who have
access to children of the right age to try this with. I almost surprised
that no one has tried this since those original experiments were done in
the 70s.
Ray Recchia
At 07:07 PM 9/9/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Apparently, although parts I and III of this paper posted, Part II
>failed to. Here it is...
>THE CONTRIBUTION OF SEMIOTICS
>
>The growth of the discipline of semiots has furnished
>investigators with more precise and powerful ways of seeking to
>answer such questions. Semiotics is the study of signs and sign
>systems, and is subdivided into syntactics (the study of sigh-sign
>relations within a sign system), pragmatics (the study of the
>relationship of signs to their producers), and semantics (the study
>of the relationship between signs and the referents which they
>represent). Far broader than the study of language per se,
>semiotics studies all types of symbolic behavior, and insights
>garnered in the field have made possible the deveopment of
>experiments the results of which unambiguously indicate the
>presence or absence of capacities within preverbal infants. For
>instance, a study by Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) explored the
>acquisition of self-awareness in preverbal infants by attempting to
>elicit behavior symbolic of its presence or absence. Infants were
>placed in front of mirrors after a spot of rouge was applied to each
>infant's nose. If the infant ignored the rouge or touched the mirror
>(as if the image was one of a conspecific, or another infant), self-
>awareness was judged to be absent. If, however, the infant
>touched his or her own nose, he or she was deemed to be self-
>aware. Such nose-touching behavior was never observed in infants
>younger than fifteen months of age, and rarely prior to eighteen;
>between the ages of eithteen and twenty months a dramatic
>increase in self-directed behavior was noted, and at the age of
>twenty-four months practiaclly all subjects tested touched their
>noses. This is the same period in which object permanence
>appears, thus corroborating Piaget's hypothesis that construction
>of self and reality proceed in parallel from their perceptual
>interface into internalized self-identity and externalized world-
>stability (1972, 1976). An experiment of this type would seem to
>offer the best hope of investigating the development of perceptual
>structure within the child.
>
>EXPERIMENTAL RATIONALE
>
>The disruption of the mother's face-voice relationship has been
>shown to distress infants four months old, and perhaps as early as
>one month old (Aronson & Rosenbloom, 1971; Carpenter, 1973;
>McGurk and Lewis, 1974). This entails that by the age of four
>months (and possibly earlier), both the mother's face and her voice
>are known to and recognizeable by the infant, and this fact can be
>used in studies based upon selective attention.
>
>EXPERIMENT ONE - EXPLORING THE DEVELOPMENT OF
>STRUCTURAL SOPHISTICATION IN THE VISUAL FIELDS
>OF PREVERBAL INFANTS
>
>Infants of various ages are chosen who demonstrate selective
>attention to pictures of their mothers' faces. They are than
>presented with increasingly abstract representational renderings of
>their mothers' faces, nested within arrays of representations,
>rendered in the same styles, of the faces of adults unfamiliar to
>them. Some forms of abstraction which readily suggest
>themselves are color, shape (mirror distortion), and gestalt
>closure, as well as two or more types of alteration in concert. The
>percentage of presence of selective attention to the renderings of
>their mothers' faces is noted for each age group and the data is
>analyzed for significant statistical differences.
>
>EXPERIMENT TWO - EXPLORING THE DEVELOPMENT OF
>STRUCTURAL SOPHISTICATION IN THE AUDITORY
>FIELDS OF PREVERBAL INFANTS
>
>Infants are chosen who display selective attention to recordings of
>their mothers' voices. They are than presented with increasingly
>distorted recordings of their mothers' voices, nested within
>sequences of strangers' voices distorted in the same manner.
>Possible forms of distortion include pitch, timbre, inflection, and
>two or more types of distortion in combination. The percentage of
>presence of selective attention to the recordings of their mothers'
>voices is noted for each age group and the data is anlyzed for
>significant statistical differences.
>
>COMMENTS UPON PROPOSED EXPERIMENTS
>
>In both experimental cases, the develoment of perceptual
>sophistication in the studied modality may be inferred from the
>level of abstraction and distortion which nevertheless elicits
>statistically significant selective attention from the preverbal
>infants. It is hypothecized that older infants will selectively attend
>to more complexly altered stimuli, and that critical periods akin to
>the one for self-awareness which Lewis and brooks-Gunn found
>will be discovered, one for visuospatial stimuli and one for
>auditory stimuli, where dramatic increases in the infants'
>recognition (measured via selective attention) of altered or
>distorted mother-based stimuli will be observed, and that these
>critical periods will be mappable onto the sequence of cortical
>myelination noted in Kraft.
>
>
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