From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Wed 10 Sep 2003 - 00:53:24 GMT
Date sent: Tue, 09 Sep 2003 20:41:47 -0400
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: Ray Recchia <rrecchia@frontiernet.net>
Subject: Re: The Ontogenesis of the Gurwitschian
Perceptual Structure
Part II
Send reply to: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Did you read parts I and III? They are accessible at:
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=53;action=display;threadid
=29011
This would perhaps assit in placing Part II in context.
I would love to run these experiments, but lack the resources; if anyone
else would like to do so, feel free - just let me know how they come out.
> 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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===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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