baillargeon's infant abilities

• knowledge of the physical world

  baillargeon - while piaget thought babies <8-9 months had little understanding of the physical world, baillargeon suggested that infants have an understanding of the physical world much greater than he suggested

  • they may just lack the motor skills or attention to follow the objects
  • developed violation of expectation research to prove this
• violation of expectation research

  baillargeon - method of investigation that suggests if children have knowledge of the physical world they will expect certain things to happen in possible/impossible situations

  • measured object permanence by comparing reactions (length of time watching) to expected/unexpected events
  • test focus on objects going in and out of sight in sometimes impossible manners
  • baillargeon + graber - occlusion tasks - looked for ~8 seconds longer at the impossible task (33 s) vs the possible task (25 s)

  
• types of violation of expectations research

  hespos + baillargeon - if babies pay more attention to the impossible event than the possible event they have good understanding of the physical world

  • occlusion - hiding an object from view, impossible condition involves an object not being visible when we would expect it to be
  • containment - if a object is seen to be placed in a container it should still be there when the container is reopened
  • support - an object should fall when no longer supported by a horizontal object
• controlling violation of expectations research

  • motor skills - baillargeon studied the length of time babies watched an event, whereas piaget required the movement abilities to reach a toy
  • attention - stopped and resumed the timer if babies looked away and then looked back to compensate for the fact that babies that young may not have the attention span to continuously concentrate
• infant physical reasoning

  baillargeon - humans have an innate physical reasoning system

  • prs - hardwired basic understanding of the physical world and have an ability to learn more details easily
  • we are predisposed to watch new events that enhance our understanding of the world
  • begins primitve and becomes more sophisticated through experience
  • object persistence - object remains in existence without altering in structure even if we can't see it
  • skill is used to learn other categories of ways that objects behave
• evaluation

  + overcomes piaget's methodological issues - controlled for babies lesser attention and motor skills

  + babies can't show demand characteristics

  + hespos + marle - innate understanding of physical world means theory is universally applicable

  + fits with other cognitive research eg. infants have distance judgement from very early on

  - piaget - acting in line with a principle doesn't mean that the babies understand that principle, so babies may not actually have object permanence

  - inferred a conclusion as we can't talk to babies

  - can't test something innate so unfalsifiable