Instructor's Notes
To assign the questions that follow this reading, click “Browse More Resources for this Unit,” or go to the Resources panel.
To look at techniques for answering any exam question, let’s take one example. A final exam in developmental psychology posed this question:
What evidence indicates innate factors in perceptual organization? You might find it useful to recall any research that shows how infants perceive depth and forms.
David Ian Cohn sat back and thought over the course reading. What perception research had used babies for subjects? He jotted down an informal outline, took a deep breath, and wrote a straightforward answer.
David Ian CohnStudent Essay Answer
Response to Psychology Question
Research on infants is probably the best way to demonstrate that some factors in perceptual organization are innate. As the cliff box experiment shows, an infant will avoid what looks like a drop-off, even though its mother calls it and even though it can feel glass covering the drop-off area. The same infant will crawl to the other end of the box, which appears (and is) safe. Apparently, infants do not have to be taught what a cliff looks like.
Psychologists have also observed that infants are aware of size constancy. They recognize a difference in size between a 10 cm box at a distance of one meter and a 20 cm box at a distance of two meters. If this phenomenon is not innate, it is at least learned early, for the subjects of the experiment were infants of sixteen to eighteen months.
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When shown various patterns, infants tend to respond more noticeably to patterns that resemble the human face than to those that appear random. This seemingly innate recognition helps the infant distinguish people (such as its mother) from less important inanimate objects.
Infants also seem to have an innate ability to match sight with sound. When simultaneously shown two television screens, each depicting a different subject, while being played a tape that sometimes matched one screen and sometimes the other, infants looked at whichever screen matched what they heard—not always, but at least twice as often.
Questions to Start You Thinking
Meaning
What is the main idea of Cohn’s answer?
If you were the psychology instructor, how could you immediately see that Cohn had thoroughly dealt with—and only with—the question?
Writing Strategies
In what places is Cohn’s answer concrete and specific, not general?
Suppose Cohn had tacked on a conclusion: “Thus I have conclusively proved that there are innate factors in perceptual organization, by citing much evidence showing that infants definitely can perceive depth and forms.” Would that sentence strengthen his answer? Why, or why not?