Baillargeon

Question 1

What did Baillargeon do?

Answer 1

• in the 1980s she pointed out that alternative research methods have suggested that younger babies may have a better-developed understanding of the physical world than was previously thought, she developed the violation of expectation method to investigate infant understanding of the physical world

Question 2

What is the early research on knowledge of the physical world?

Answer 2

• Piaget believed that babies less than 8-9 months of age have a very primitive understanding of the nature of the physical world e.g. he claimed they are not aware that objects continue to exist after they leave the visual field
• Piaget’s reasoning was based on his research showing that from this age babies would reach for an object removed from their view but prior to this they would immediately lose interest once the object was out of sight
• some later psychologists were critical of Piaget’s research in this area as it is possible that younger babies do not peruse a hidden object simply because they do not have the motor skills and alternatively they may lose interest because their abilities of selective attention are not well enough developed to stop themselves becoming distracted

Question 3

What is the violation of expectation research?

Answer 3

• Baillargeon explains violation of expectation by saying in a typical experiment, infants see two test events: an expected event, which is consistent with the expectation examined in the experiment and an unexpected event, which violates this expectation so if the violation of expectation method is used to test object permanence, infants will typically see two or more conditions in which objects pass in and out of sight
• in a control condition the object behaves as a person with object permanence would expect e.g. a tall object will appear in a window as it basses behind a screen but a short object will not as it passes below the window

Question 4

What is the violation of expectation procedure?

Answer 4

• in early violation of expectation experiments Baillargeoon and Graber showed 24 infants, aged 5-6 months, a tall and a short rabbit pass behind a screen with a window in the possible condition the tall rabbit can be seen passing the window but the short one cannot
• In the impossible neither rabbit appeared at the window

Question 5

What are violation of expectation findings?

Answer 5

• the infants looked for an average of 33.07 seconds at the impossible event as compared to 25.11 seconds in the possible condition
• the researchers interpreted this as meaning that the infants were surprised at the impossible condition
• for them to be surprised it follows that they must have known that the tall rabbit should have re-appeared

Question 6

Which other studies looked at violation of expectation?

Answer 6

• violation of expectation experiments have also been used to test infant understanding of containment and support
• containment is the idea that when an object is seen to enter a container it should be still there when the container is opened
• support is the idea that an object should fall when unsupported but not when it is on a horizontal surface
• in all these cases infants have shown that they pay more attention to impossible events and so appear to have an understanding of the physical world which was shown in Hespos and Baillargeon

Question 7

-What is Baillargeons theory of infant physical reasoning?

Answer 7

• Baillargeon et al propose that humans are born with a physical reasoning system which means we are born hard-wired with both a basic understanding of the physical world and the ability to learn more details easily
• initially we have a primitive awareness of the physical properties of the world and the ability to learn more details easily
• one aspect of the world of which we have a crude understanding from birth is objective persistence which is roughly the same idea as Piaget’s object permanence which is the idea that an object remains in existence and does not spontaneously alter in structure
• in the first few weeks of life infants begin to identify event categories
• each event category corresponds to one way in which objects interact e.g. occlusion events take place when one object blocks the view of another as a child is born with a basic understanding of object persistence and quickly learns that one object can block their view of another, by the time they are tested in tasks like Baillargeon and Graber’s violation of expectation with talk and short rabbits, children actually have a good understanding that the tall rabbit should appear at the window
• the impossible event captures infants attention because the nature of their PRS means they are predisposed to attend to new events that might allow them to develop their understanding of the physical world

Question 8

What are the evaluation points of Baillargeon’s explanation of infant abilities?

Answer 8

+its a better test of infant understanding that Piaget’s as he believed looking away meant they’d lost interest but billargeon measured how long they spent looking at the event
-its hard to judge what an infant understands as they lack motor skills so they may just see the events as different rather than impossible
-PRS explains why physical understanding is universal as there are no cultural differences
+PRS is consistent with what we know of other infant abilities e.g. research that shows distance perception is innate but developed with age

Question 9

How is the fact that Baillargeons test of infant understanding is better than Piaget a strength of Baillargeon’s theory

Answer 9

• there were always problems with Piaget’s methods for studying children’s knowledge of the physical World
• Piaget assumed that when a baby shifted attention away from an out of sight object which means that the child no longer knew it existed yet the child might have shifted attention simply because they lost interest
• the violation of expectations method is probably a better method for investigating whether a child has some understanding of the permanent nature of objects because it eliminates this confounding variable
• simply losing interest in an object would not explain findings that children look for longer at impossible events which means that the violation of expectations method

Question 10

Why is fact that its hard to judge what an infant understands a weakness of Baillargeon’s theory?

Answer 10

• Baillargeon’s research clearly shows that infants look for significantly longer at some scenes than others
• it appears that they look longer at scented where objects appear to violate physical laws like object permanence yet what violation of expectations experiments really show is that babies behave as we might expect them to if they understood the physical world
• the problems with this is: we are guessing and can never know how a baby might actually behave in response to a violation of expectations, they might not actually look at impossible events for longer than possible events
• although infants look for different lengths of time at different lengths of time at different events, this merely means that they see them as different, there may be any number of reasons why they find one scene more interesting
• these problems mean. Hat the violation of expectations method may not be an entirely valid way of investigating infant understanding

Question 11

Why is the fact that PRS explains why physical understanding is universal a strength of Baillargeon’s theory?

Answer 11

• Hespos and Van Marley point out that without learning and regardless of experience we all have very good understanding of the basic properties of physical objects
• They give the example of dangling keys, we all know that if we let go of a key ring it will fall to the floor
• according to Hespos and Van Marley this understanding requires a physical reasoning system
• the fact that this system is innate - otherwise we would expect cultural differences for which there is a lack of evidence
• this is a strength of Baillargeon’s idea of the PRS because its universal nature suggests that it is innate, as Baillargeon believed

Question 12

How do children understand physical concepts

Answer 12

• Baillargeon suggested that even very young infants have a crude awareness of the physical properties of an object
• nursery nurse Tina is surprised at the reaction when she drops her keys behind a desk one day
• the keys land silently in an open drawer rather than jingling noisily on the floor
• Tina finds the children that saw there keys fall were looking intently

Question 13

What type of study is the Baillargeon and Graber study?

Answer 13

-an occlusion study in which one object occluded another like its in front of

Question 14

how is the fact that PRS is consistent with what we know of other infant abilities a strength of Baillargeon?

Answer 14

• its very difficult to directly test Baillargeon’s idea that there is an innate physical reasoning system that contains some basic understanding from birth but which becomes more sophisticated with age
• however, the PRS is consistent with other research into infant cognitive abilities
• for example, research shows that infants can use crude patterns to judge distance from an early age but that experience is required to make use of more subtle texture differences
• distance perception therefore appears to be an innate system that becomes more sophisticated with age