8- Physical World Spelke Flashcards
what did Kellman and Spelke show?
showed that babies of 3 - 4 months dishabituated to (looked longer at) a broken rod. When a rod is hidden and they can see two pieces at the top and bottom they assume these two pieces are joined.
They have understood that the rod exists, although they cannot see it.
“Infants, like adults, may conceive of the world as composed of things that are spatially connected, that move independently of each other, and that persist over their free movements”.
what does a 6 month old baby fail to do in regard to an out of view object? and what would piaget argue this meant?
6 month old infants fail to search for an out-of-view object: Piaget would say this means they have no representation of the object when it is not visible.
what is Spelke’s core knowledge theory?
very young infants have many congnitive capacities available: Object representation Number Space Agents and actions
Innate, domain- specific systems of knowledge.
Each system has its own set of core principles
Learning is an enrichment of the core principles
what did Baillareon do and show regarding infants view of objects?
showed drawbridge display to children
1)habitiuation- drawbridge moving back and fourth
2) a) drawbridge stopped by block
b) drawbridge seems to move through block
infants dishabituated when screen appeared to pass through the place where the box had been located.
shows that infants represent:
- the spatial location of objects
- the fact that they exist continuously (even if hidden)
- the fact that solid objects cannot pass through one another
what are criticisms of Baillaregon’s drawbridge experiment?
Individual variation: in the drawbridge study, only fast habituators show the effects.
Need for careful control: when habituated to the impossible event, babies looked longer at the possible event: just interested in novelty (Cashon & Cohen 2000).
what did Xu and Spelke do regarding approximation of numbers and infants?
children shown a habituation set of 8 or 16 dots (diff layout and size but same number).
test set has one containing 16 and one containing 8- (size and density= same) thus both different sizes to habituation display
6 month olds looked longer at the new number than the old number.
they can discriminate between a set of 8 and 16 but not 8vs. 12
what could a potential flaw to Xu and Spelke’s experiment regarding core number knowledge?
both of the test displays have changed size to control for density- so it may be this change in size which the infants are looking at.
2) the 16 dot display has a bigger continuous extent so infants may naturally look at that longer…
3) Mix, Huttenlocher and Devine- contour length- imagine string around each circle- infants may have been paying attention to this and not the number- so look at different number because it had a different contour length. (would also explain why 8-12 cant be perceived).
what did Feigenson 2005 show regarding number counting in infants?
infants computed number when objects differed in color, pattern & texture; and continuous extent when the objects were identical.
what is the blue wall study by Hermer and Spelke and what did it show?
teddy hidden in corner of a room with a blue wall.(in corner of blue wall) Child is disorientated.
child searches in the correct corner and rotationally correct corner equally often
Both rats and human adults use geometric info to reorient themselves.
Spelke concludes that children have a geometric module for reorientation- they don’t use colour.
What were criticism’s of Hermer and Spelke’s blue wall study?
the room was very small. toddlers do use colour for reorientation in a large room Learmonth et al.
According to Spelke’s core knowledge what do infants have?
- understanding of objects which is independent of action and understand some key physical properties of objects.
- represent the rough number of objects present in a display
- basic mechanisms for representing the spatial layout of their environments.
according to Spelke’s core knowledge theory how do the domains operate?
independantly of one another until later in childhood when they are bound together by language.
what does Gonpnk argue with her scientist in the crib theory?
argues that very young infants think like scientists, observing the statistics of their environments; forming and testing hypotheses, and revising their theories on the basis of new data.
what did Xu and Garcia find about babies ability to make inductive references?
5 balls taken out of a box- 4 red 1 white
baby then shown contents of the box either majority red with a few white or majority white (unexpected)
8 moth old infants looked longer at the unexpected display.
used info about a sample to make inferences about a population.
which experiment showed that 3-4 year olds are able to learn about causes? (Gopnik and Sobel)
Children are given experience of objects which had a new causal power: the ability to make a machine light up.
Child is shown that two of these make it light up & play music; two don’t.
Then shown one that does, and told “this one is a blicket. Can you show me another blicket?”
Results: they chose the one with the same causal powers on 74% of trials.
