Baillergeon Flashcards
Outline Biallergeons theory
Biallergeon said that children know more than what Piaget emphasized and that a lack of object permanence could instead be due to a lack of motor ability and coordination
Outline violation of expectation research
Babies see two events, one expected and one unexpected. To examine object permanence, researchers passed two objects in and out of a babies visual field.
What was Baillergeon and Graber’s VOE procedure
studied 24 babies aged 5-6 months
-A tall and short rabbit passed behind a screen and were not visible till they reached the other side
-In the expected condition, when a window was placed in the screen, the tall rabbit was visible in the window but not the small rabbit
-In the unexpected VOE condition, neither the tall or short rabbit were visible in the window.
What were the findings of Baillergeon’s VOE experiment
Babies looked for 33.07 seconds at the unexpected condition compared to 25.11 seconds at the expected condition.
This suggests that the babies must have expected for the rabbit to be visible in the window as they were surprised when this did not happen.
What have other studies shown about object permanence in babies.
In other studies such as containment and support studies, infants have shown to have been more surprised by the unexpected event, showing they have a good understanding of the physical world
What did Baillergeon say about babies phsyical reasoning?
Babies are born with an innate physical reasoning system, which begins as primitive survival skills but becomes more complex with experience, meaning we can understand new things.
Emphasized object PERSISTENCE = similar to object permanence.
Because babies are born with object persistence, by the time they take VOE experiments their attention is drawn to unexpected events, in order to develop their understanding of the world.
