Shape constancy

Kaye and Bower 1994: babies can guess what a dummy should look like from their experience of sucking one.

•Bower 1965: –6-8 week old Babies were conditioned (check your methods sheet for how this is done) to look at a 30 cm cube place 1 metre away. –Then they were shown 3 different cubes: •A 30cm cube placed 3metres away, (which gave a smaller retinal image than the original.) •A 90cm cube, 1 metre away (larger retinal image) •   They looked at the one that gave the same size image. A 90cm cube 3 metres away (same size image)

•Newborns –Can discriminate between stripes and a uniform surface           •Fantz (1961) newborns prefer to look at patterns rather than dull stimuli and prefer more complex visual patterns as they get older.

Infants prefer looking at complex patterns such as faces: •They prefer human faces by 2-7 months old & can recognise mum’s face (Fantz)-

By 3 months they prefer human faces that have symmetrical features (Maurer & Maurer, 1988).

Maybe because of the way they look at faces – initially they scan the outside and later the internal features such as mouth, eyes and nose.