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Major points
- 1. babies have innate perceptual abilities
- 2. Fantz - eye gaze and habituation
- 3. Dummy sucking - deliberate action and choice between stimuli
- 4. cross-modal perception
- 5. Object permanence
- a) Piaget's A not B
- b) Baillargeon's violation of expectation (object permanence and memory)
- c) Haith's criticisms of Baillargeon
- d) Neuroimaging: suggests Baillargeon wins (Kaufman) - but we can critique this
- 6. causal contingency
- memory of novel cause-effect relationship
- 7. working memory span
- 8. cause-and effect (Leslie and Keeble)
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What visual perceptual experimental evidence shows infants have inborn capacity to distinguish between different entities.
- 'visual preference' - Fantz (eye gazing of schematic faces)
- more preference for complex visuals
- Habituation (Slater & Morrison) - preference for novelty in infants (renewed looking after bored with first object when new object is shown) showing they can distinguish betwen items.
- even in 1-3 yo baby
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What experiment showed infants can deliberaately choose between stimuli
- 'sucking' experiment (De Casper & Fifer)
- play mother's voice when sucking rate increased, play strange female voice when rate decreases
- Infants rapidly learned to increase rate
- Good experiment: next day, experimenters reversed the contingency and now slower sucking required --> they changed it
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Experimental evidence showing babies can perceive cross-modally.
- 1 month old babies (Meltzoff & Borton)
- suck smooth or nibbled surface (without looking at dummy)
- they prefer to look at picture of dummy they had just been sucking
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What other paradigm is good for infant studies?
violation of expectation
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Give violation of expectation experiment example and why it is good.
- Baillargeon et al
- Drawbridge experiment
- She criticised Piaget and others' experiments that required action which babies aren't good at
- 5-month old babies habituated to display where screen rotates 180 degrees towards and away from baby
- Box placed on path of screen
- Baby looked at display longer when screen seemed to pass through an apparent solid box (by rotating the whole 180 degrees rather than stopping at 120)
- 5-month old babies have understaning of object permanence
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What is Piaget's experiment of object permanencne?
- A-not-B error
- Children older than 10/18months can pass this
- (but requires motor action)
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Another Baillargeon experiment using violation of expectation but about memory.
- Display - toy could be placed in location A or B
- placed in A and then screen slid in front of both locations, hiding it
- Then, hand reaches behind screen and retrieve toy from B - impossible event
- Infants looked more closely at this 'impossible' event
- Conclusion: babies could remember location of object during delay
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What are some of the crticisms against Baillargeon's methods and conclusions?
- eg. Haith
- argues she doesn't distinguish between perceptual explanations and cognitive explanations
- They argue Baillargeon must be able to discount every perceptual interpretaiton of differences in looking time before proposing cognitive interpretations of looking behaviour
- Perceptual explanations: simple mehcnaism such as novelty, scanning and tracking mechanisms can explain behaviour
- Haith: disntinguishes between simple lingering sensory information vs conceptual representations of objects
- sensory activity in perceptual system
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To resolve Baillargeon vs Haith, what method used? What conclusion?
- cognitive neuroimaging (Kaufman et al)
- EEG of train and tunnel experiment
- train enters tunnel, tunnel lifted to either show train (expected) or no train (unexpected)
- train also enters and leaves tunnel, tunnel lifted to either show train (unexpected) and no train (expected)
- Behavioural: infants looked longer at unexpected displays
- EEG: sustained activity peaking around 500ms after the lifting of tunnel
- Conclusion: peaks after reveal, sugggesting this was cognitive representation rather than degraded sensory inputs
- increased activity an attempt o maintain representation of
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Criticise Kaufman's study.
The increased EEG activity afterwards could be arrousal or surprise, and not mental representation
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Experiment about infant memory with causal contingency paradigm.
- Contingency betwene response and reward
- Conditioned respons - kicking; reward - mobile above cot activated
- Even 3-month olds kicked after a time gap even when mobile no longer activated
- Even for as long as 2 -weeks and 1 month (if they were reminded)
- Babies can learn this very novel causal relaionship
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Experiment on infant's working 'memory span'
- Rose et al
- present infant (at age 5,7, 12 months - longitudinal) with 4 items and then paired them with novel items to test recognition
- if they looked briefly at image, seen as recognition
- memory span increased with agefew 5/7mo could hold 3/4 items; but 50% of 12mo could hold 3-4 items.
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Expeirment seeming to show babies have inbuild structure to interpret events causally.
- Leslie & Keeble
- Green and red box --> launching vs delayed launching - habituated to video
- then video reversed
- in launching one, not the green box looks like it is launching red
- in this reversed video, infants showed more recovery of attention (dishabituation) than reversal of delayed launch (which doesnt show reversal of causality)
- Showed - recognition of a change in mechanical roles of the two blocks.
- HENCE: infant's percept of direct launch is encoding causal relationship as well as spatiotemporal information
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