Baillargoen: Explanation of Infant Abilities Flashcards
Who’s ideas did he challenge and how?
He challenged Piaget’s ideas abou the sensorimotor stage, proposing that infants have a fairly well-developed understanding of the physical world.
What research did he conduct?
Violation of expectation research.
What was the research methodology?
24 infants were shown a tall and short rabbit passing behind a screen with a window.
Possible condition- Tall rabbit is seen behind the window, short isn’t.
Impossible condition- Neither rabbit is seen behind window.
What were the research findings?
Possible event- Looked for 25.11 seconds.
Impossible event- 33.07 seconds.
What do the research findings suggest?
That infants understand object permeance.
What other studies did Baillargeon and Graber conduct?
Containment- If an object is placed in a container it will still be there when it’s opened.
Support- An object should fall when unsupported but not when on a horizontal surface.
What is Baillargeon’s theory of infant physical reasoning?
He proposed that infants are born with physical reasoning (we are hard-wired with a basic understanding of the physical world).
Evaluate Baillargeon’s study compared to Piaget’s research.
Baillargeon’s research is a better test of object permeance compared to Piaget as it eliminates confounding variables meaning it has better validity.
What is a problem using infants in research studies?
It’s hard to judge what an infant understands as:
We are guessing and can’t know the actual response.
They look for different lengths of time but it just shows us they think of the objects as different.
