Cognition + Development - Baillargeon (GREY) Flashcards
Who is Baillargeon?
She challenged Piaget’s ideas about babies’ abilities in the sensorimotor stage, including object permanence.
She has tested babies understanding of object permanence and occlusion (blocking) over many years, using violation of expectation trials.
What is violation of expectation research?
Involves showing babies something that they do not expect to see happen, something which is impossible if you understand physical laws.
They measure whether the baby is surprised by how long they look at ‘gaze’ the scene that is manipulated for them.
What happened in Baillargeon’s violation of expectation research?
24 infants (5-6 months old) were shown possible and impossible events.
The possible showed a small rabbit become not visible behind a wall and the impossible showed a tall rabbit go behind a wall but not become visible through a window, even though that was expected.
Possible event: babies looked for an average of 25.11 seconds at the possible event.
Impossible event: babies looked for an average of 33.07 seconds at the impossible event.
What study was Baillargeon’s research known as?
An occlusion study which tests an understanding that one object will block another, as well as object permanence.
How did Baillargeon explain these abilities in young infants?
Due to an innate physical reasoning system where infants can quickly learn about occlusion that objects can block each other and they are predisposed to attend to new events that allow them to develop their understanding of the physical world.
Why does Baillargeon’s research give us a better understanding of infant capabilities than Piaget’s?
Piaget has been criticised because perhaps in his studies, babies looked away because they just lost interest rather than because they thought the object had ceased to exist.
Baillargeon’s does not face the same criticism because she used two conditions.
If babies just lose interest, they should lose interest equally whatever they’re looking at.
However, she found they kept looking for longer at ‘impossible’ events, showing surprise.
How does Baillargeon’s study have high control?
Babies were sat on their parent’s lap for the studies, but any influence from the parent was controlled by the parent closing their eyes and not interacting with their infant during the trials.
This prevents demand characteristics being picked up from the parent.
Therefore this improves internal validity.
They also used a double blind procedure, both participant and researcher are unaware of the aim and/or which condition the participant is in.
