Baillargeon's explanation of early infant abilities Flashcards
What did Baillargeon disagree with Piaget about?
Object permanence.
What was Baillargeon’s explanation for early infant abilities?
She believed that infants do have an understanding of OP, but they do not have the motor skills to acquire the hidden object.
What is a violation of expectation?
A research technique where a situation that is physically impossible is presented and it violates what you believe should happen.
What was the aim of Baillargeon and Garber’s VOE research?
To investigate whether infants are aware of object permanence by seeing if they will pay attention to an impossible event longer than a possible one.
Outline Baillargeon and Garbers method.
-Sample, 24 infants aged 4-6 months.
-There was a familiarisation event which introduced the task and various scenarios.
-Two conditions:
Possible= Short rabbit passes behind a screen and wasn’t able to be seen until at the other end of the screen.
Others watched a tall rabbit pass behind a screen with a window, which could be seen.
Impossible= Tall rabbit passed behind a screen with a window, but it could not be seen through the screen. Which goes against the principles of object permanence.
What did Baillargeon and Garber find from their VOE research?
On average, the children looked at the:
-Possible= 25.11 seconds
-Impossible= 33.07 seconds
What did Baillargeon and Garber conclude from their VOE research?
Infants were surprised at the impossible event, suggesting that infants do understand object permanence.
What is the main suggestion of Baillargeon’s theory?
That humans are born with a physical reasoning system, which provide us with a simple understanding of the world around us.
What did Baillargeon suggest about object permanence?
We have some understanding of OP from birth.
What did Baillargeon suggest infants develop in the first few weeks of life?
Event categories.
What are event categories?
Occlusion (when one object blocks the view of another), gravity, rolling, friction etc.
Give an advantage of Baillargeon.
+The physical reasoning system explains universality of physical understanding.
It explains why there are no cultural differences, because we are all born with it already. We all see things the same.
Give disadvantages of Baillargeon.
-Has researcher bias.
She used her own research to create her theory, she could have interpreted the findings in certain ways.
-Hard to find out what an infant actually understands.
Just because they were looking at it doesn’t mean they were looking for it. We can’t know because we can’t ask the child. It is based only on her inferences and assumptions.
