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Abolghasem, Zahra

University of British Columbia

While an infant has access to their senses, their perceptual system is, initially, only able to make limited sense of their world. Their perceptual system develops as a result of a combination of multiple factors, including the infant’s sensory experiences. The processes involved with translating sensory experiences in infancy into changes in perception have been a topic of discourse. It is unclear whether experience-based development is exclusively driven by the accumulation of sensory information, termed the bottom-up view, or also driven by the feedback signals from higher-level brain systems that engage because of the sensory experiences, termed the top-down view. Recent studies, such as Emberson and colleagues (2015), have found that top-down processes are involved in infants’ perception, such that learned expectations engage feedback connections that influence the processing of the sensory information. A behavioural example of this has been shown by Xiao and Emberson (2023) who demonstrated that quickly learned audiovisual cues modulate an infant’s motion perception. In their study, Xiao and Emberson (2023) showed infants that audiovisual cues were predictive of a particular direction of motion in a motion display. When infants were shown a motion display with no directional motion, they found that the learned audiovisual cues, alone, induced the perception of motion in the predicted direction, an example of top-down modulation. In this thesis, two direct replications of Xiao and Emberson (2023) were conducted as the first step of a larger study to investigate how these changes in perceptual processing induced by top-down processes could lead to long-term developmental changes. While the results replicated the findings from the directional motion displays (i.e., when strong motion signals were presented), evidence for top-down modulation, the key findings from Xiao and Emberson (2023), failed to replicate across the two attempts. We discuss potential explanations for the failure to replicate and future steps.

Text

2024-08-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88905

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/