Week 7 - physical world

• Researchers studied infants understanding of objects through violation of expectation tasks
• within VOE habituation or familiarisation is followed by one of 2 tasks- unexpected or expected test trial
• Different violations of expectation include unity, continuity, solidity, contact and gravity
• unity is where infants infer the boundaries of an object as a whole from the boundaries of its parts. Blocked off elements move together giving the infant the impression that its a single moving object
• continuity - infants expect an object to move at the same speed and motion due to their spatiotemporal continuity of object motion however when this is decieved they look longer
• solidity refers to when an object can move through something solid
• contact is the idea that for an object to move it has to have been moved by another object first
• inertia is the idea that objects do not move on their own
• infants looked longer when objects float in the air due to their innate understanding of gravity and expect the object to fall down
• studying object knowledge in newborn children is hard due to poor vision and short attention span
• V young children display sophisticated knowledge about the physical world of objects. Newborn animals of other species also display this, even when distant to humans
• Evolution can be seen to endow humans and other animals with systems of knowledge about specific aspects of the world such as objects, places and approximate numbers
• These three systems operate as a whole, are present throughout a lifetime and support further learning
• core knowledge systems (continuity, solidity etc) help infants make sense of observed events and guide their learning and exploration
• frames of reference for representing space include: egocentric, landmark based and allocentric
• egocentric (viewer dependent) is where objects are represented relative to ones body
• Landmark based (viewer independent) where objects are repersented relative to landmarks or external objects
• Allocentric is where objects are represented relative to the landscape (sun and shit)
• historically it has been seen that infants are able to make egocentric references to objects due to these being simpler but later evidence shows infants may have considerably more objective ways of representing space
• Newcombe (1999) showed by 5 months of age infants are able to use geometric properties to locate objects. This is an example of landmark based referencing
• Newcombe used an experiment where infants found an object where it wasnt hidden and they look longer at it when found showing a violation of expectation and they have a level of geometric reasoning to object recognition.
• Kaufman (2011) found infants dishabituated and looked longer in the conditions where the pig moved with respect to the table showing infants are able to set up allocentric spatial representations.
• therefore based off these two researchers we can see by 6 months infants can encode spatial info in a viewer independent way and deploy representations based on encoding the info about landscape constancies
• rat used the geometry of the environment of long wall/ short wall causing them to pick the opposite one due to being confused from being spun around. Did not use landmark info
• in kids for the same experiment toddlers noticed the coloured wall but didnt use this to search for the hidden object showing they failed to combine geometric and non geometric landmark info
• childrens use of landmarks can be seen to be limited and they reorient using allocentric info not landmarks
• language can be used to draw childrens attention towards a particular factor or object used for navigation therefore stimulating their use of landmarks in navigation successfully
• language helps them understand the relevance of landmarks for encoding info and helps children integrate different forms of visual info such as landmarks and layout geometry
• imprinting is when animals learns to attach to the first living species they see post birth and follow them for survival - innate mechanism - irreversible and there is a sensitive period for which it needs to occur
• innate object knowledge can be studied in newborn animals of other species who have more developed visual and motor skills then human newborns
• limitations of infants core object knowledge is that they do not expect to see 2 objects behind the screen in this scenario telling us infants use limited info to track object over occlusion and fail to encode object features
• young children have difficulty using landmarks to guide their orientation and allocentric representations are mainly used emerging in infancy
• language helps integrate different forms of spatial info such as allocentric geometry of the environment with landmarks which they usually struggle with
• allocentric simply how objects are located in space compared to others
• allocentric is more just a spatial relation between 2 objects to help understand where one is whereas landmark is using a more known landmark to help locate the object