Baillargeon

• Violation of Expectations

  Refers to situations or events which contradicts what an infant thinks will happen based on their understanding of the world

  Baillargeon believed children fail Piaget's tasks because they don't have the motor skills

  She developed new paradigms based on the principle that infants will show surprise if they witness a physically impossible event
• Baillargeon and DeVos (1991) - Procedure

  32 3.5 month old infants recruited using birth announcements in local papers

  After habituation (infants get use to the stimuli), they watched a short or tall carrot slide along a track in both a possible and impossible event

  They were seated on a parents lap, and they were asked not to interact and close their eyes

  Two researchers, blind to conditions, recorded how long infants spent looking at each test event
• Baillargeon and DeVos (1991) - Findings

  The infants looked significantly longer at the impossible event than the possible event

  Concluded that the infants were more surprised with the impossible event so had object permanence
• Theory of physical reasoning

  Baillargeon proposed that human are born with physical reasoning system (PRS)

  We are born with both basic understanding of the physical world and the ability to learn more details easily

  They can perceive and form representations of objects
• Theory of physical reasoning

  Infants have the ability to quickly learn more details

  The 'principle of persistence' - infants understand generally that objects continue, but features such as size and shape are added later

  Also known as object persistence - stating an object remains the same and does not alter structure out of the visual field

  The PRS predisposes us to pay attention to 'impossible' events so we can learn and update our understanding as we develop