About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about how our perception and senses develop over time, focusing in particular on: (i) key brain regions associated with processing certain sensory information; (ii) evidence that babies can hear their surroundings before they are born; (iii) the importance of smell for babies when identifying their primary caregiver and the resultant finding that the sense of smell develops very quickly in infants; (iv) the slower development of visual acuity, resulting from a lesser necessity during development, due to babies being entirely reliant on their primary caregivers for care and safety; (v) findings from eye tracking studies evidencing this development of visual acuity by observing changes in looking behaviour towards faces, transitioning from a scattered looking behaviour to a focus on key facial features; (vi) Gibson and Walk’s visual cliff as a method of studying depth perception abilities in young children.

About the lecturer

Dr Ashok Jansari is a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Dr Jansari’s research interests include memory disorders, prosopagnosia, executive functions, and synaesthesia. Dr Jansari is most famous for his research into prosopagnosia, having made numerous TV appearances, including on BBC1’s The One Show, as well as hosting his own ‘Neuro Talk’ YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/c/DrAshokJansariNeuroTalk/featured

Some of Dr Jansari's recent publications include 'Acquired synaesthesia following 2C-B use' (2019), 'Using virtual reality to investigate multitasking ability in individuals with frontal lobe lesions' (2019), and 'Identification from CCTV: Assessing police super-recogniser ability to spot faces in a crown and susceptibility to change blindness' (2018).