Development of Perception in Infancy

The developing infant can accomplish all important perceptual tasks that an adult can, albeit with less skill or precision. Through infant perception research, infant responses to experiences enable researchers to reveal perceptual competence, test hypotheses about processes, and infer neural mechanisms, and researchers are able to address age-old questions about perception and the origins of knowledge.

In Development of Perception in Infancy: The Cradle of Knowledge Revisited, Martha E. Arterberry and Philip J. Kellman study the methods and data of scientific research on infant perception, introducing and analyzing topics (such as space, pattern, object, and motion perception) through philosophical, theoretical, and historical contexts. Infant perception research is placed in a philosophical context by addressing the abilities with which humans appear to be born, those that appear to emerge due to experience, and the interaction of the two. The theoretical perspective is informed by the ecological tradition, and from such a perspective the authors focus on the information available for perception, when it is used by the developing infant, the fit between infant capabilities and environmental demands, and the role of perceptual learning. Since the original publication of this book in 1998 (MIT), Arterberry and Kellman address in addition the mechanisms of change, placing the basic capacities of infants at different ages and exploring what it is that infants do with this information. Significantly, the authors feature the perceptual underpinnings of social and cognitive development, and consider two examples of atypical development - congenital cataracts and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Professionals and students alike will find this book a critical resource to understanding perception, cognitive development, social development, infancy, and developmental cognitive neuroscience, as research on the origins of perception has changed forever our conceptions of how human mental life begins.

Martha E. Arterberry is Professor of Psychology at Colby College, Maine. She received her BA from Pomona College and her PhD from the University of Minnesota. She previously was Professor of Psychology at Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania, and she is a collaborative investigator at the Child and Family Research Section of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Arterberry currently serves as a consulting editor for Developmental Psychology, and she is a co-author of Development in Infancy: A Contemporary Introduction, Fifth Edition (2013). Her research interests in perceptual and cognitive development include the study of depth perception, three-dimensional object perception, categorization, and memory.

Philip J. Kellman is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Cognitive Area in the Department of Psychology, and Adjunct Professor of Surgery, at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his BS from Georgetown University, and his MA and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He has received numerous awards including the Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award from the American Psychological Association, and the William Chase Memorial Award from Carnegie-Mellon University, and he has been elected a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and of the Association for Psychological Science. His research interests include object, space, and motion perception, perceptual learning, and applications of perception and cognition to develop and optimize computer-based learning technology.