baillargeon Flashcards
Define violation of expectance (VOE)
infants will show surprise when witnessing an impossible event- able to know what their expectations are and MKO will give child info to change what they expect to happen
Outline Baillargeon and Grabber’s research into VOE
M: infants shown an event that is familiar to the and then shown an event that is impossible to occur- measured time infant payed attention to each event
R: >3 months demonstrated object permanence when tested as looked for 33.07 seconds at impossible event and 25.11 seconds at possible event
C: object permanence occurs before the time Piaget stated and VOE occurs in infants >3 months
Outline the explanations of infant knowledge of physical world
PRS (physical reasoning system) and that impossible events capture attention as nature of PRS predisposes them to new event to develop understanding
define PRS (physical reasoning system)
primitive awareness of physical properties of world- become more sophisticated from experience
Evaluate Baillargeon’s theory
A: better test of infant understanding then Piaget: Piaget assumed when baby shifted attention away from out-of-sight object it meant that child no longer knew it existed but they may have shifted their attention due to loosing interest- VOE is better method of understanding child’s knowledge of permanent objects as it eliminated cofounding variables as losing interest in an object doesn’t explain children looking longer at impossible events
-> validity
A: PRS explains why understanding is universal: Hespos + Marie show without learning and regardless to experience that we all have good understanding of physical objects (e.g. dangling keys, if we let go they fall to the floor)- suggesting PRS is innate
C: hard to judge what infants understand: VOE experiments show babies behave how we expect them to- problems: guessing and can’t validate length of time they look
-> not valid method of looking into infants object permanence
