Early Conceptions on Physical World Flashcards
Which theoretical approach argues knowledge is inbuilt and innate?
Nativism
Which theoretical approach argues knowledge is acquired through the senses
Constructivism
Which theory argued:
-Knowledge is acquired
Infants only fleet uncoordinated perceptions, no other knowledge of world
Action= act on the world to make sense of input
(derive meaning from sernsory perceptions)
By acting on objects they experience the world, not enough to observe others
Piaget’s Constructivist theory
Which theory has the 4 principles of:
Solidity
Cohesion
Contact
Continuity
Nativism
Which core principle of Nativism assumes:
No two objects can occupy the same space at one time
Solidity
Which theory includes the Core knowledge hypothesis:
Infants possess innate knowledge of object concepts?
-if they are not bombarded with chaotic experiences, it makes them more predictable (adaptive)
Nativism
Which core principle of Nativism assumes:
Objects are connected masses of stuff that move as a whole (eg. whole laptop doesn’t fall into pieces)
Cohesion
Which core principle of Nativism assumes:
Objects move through contact (i.e. do not move spontaneously) as a force needs to be applied for it to move
Contact
Which core principle of Nativism assumes:
Objects move in continuous paths (don’t disappear and appear in another location)
Continuity
Which theory argues:
There is a developmental change involved in babies:
-Refinement of core concepts (rather than their radical change)
and further changes in additional abilities
e.g. experience fine-tunes knowledge about support
-Babies already know the 4 core principles
Nativism
-Contrasting strongly with Piaget’s C Approach
Theories of Physical Knowledge:
What does the alternative view of representational redescription
explain in terms of how infants are led to an implicit understanding of Physical Knowledge?
Genes specify initial constraints/predispositions
these channel attention to relevant environmental inputs
As their system is very good at learning from experience, it provides
the infant with a non-chaotic system very early on from the outset
Both from hands-on and visual experience - Lead to implicit understanding (not innate knowledge)
Which type of knowledge can a child act on and verbalise?
Explicit knowledge
Change from implicit to explicit knowledge within the domain of physical understanding is known as…
representational redescription
Which knowledge allows children to pick up on patterns and probabilities in their environment?
Implicit knowledge
Which term is used to describe:
Babies have awareness that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer visible at 8-9 months (late)
Object permanence
-Piaget
-Sensorimotor stage
Which term is used to describe:
Infants search for a hidden object where they last found it
(location A) rather than at its current location (location B)
which occurs 8-12 months
A not B error
-they will go back to look for the toy under the cloth where you previously hid it not the new cloth where you just hid it, they believe you will recreate the toy by unfolding cloth A
What age does A not B error occur?
8-12 months
Piaget found late evidence for Object permanence and the A not B error in infants But…..
(Critical Evaluation)
He relied on manual search tasks: Methodology
Criticism: could be underestimating infants knowledge
What is a new method to measure babies knowledge?
Eye tracking
Manual search vs. looking time measures
The Drawbridge study measuring permanence & solidity:
Which event did infants show a longer looking time?
Possible event- round thing hits block and bounces back
Impossible event -suggests it has violated their expectations (violation of expectancy paradigm)
5month old infants looked longer at impossible event
Even though impossible event (180° rotation) was more similar to habituation event than possible event and therefore less novel
Findings show that infants understand object continues to exist when hidden from view (Object permanence at 5m before 8m)
Challenging Piaget
What can be a controversial alternative explanation for why 5m infants looked at the impossible event in the Drawbridge study (bridge continues to pass over block)?
May have been:
Perceptual persistence (lingering activation signalling block)
- not the same as mental representation
or
Preference for events that display more motion (moving diagram)
- replication found this to be true even when block was removed
Permanence & Solidity:
Do infants 7.5m look longer when objects go through squishy or hard objects?
Longer-looking at when it goes through hard objects
Beyond infancy:
Infant shown possible (consistent) or impossible (inconsistent) outcome of ball dropping onto/ through shelf.
What did 4m infants look longer at?
Longer-looking time at inconsistent condition
for toddlers:
at 2.5 years they could do search errors
Which theorists predict that innate object knowledge should guide search behaviour in toddlers?
Nativists
Search errors: toddlers 2-2.5 years
Infants (and 2 yr olds) have knowledge but unable to use it to guide their actions
Suggests early cognitive development involves constructing knowledge-action links rather than constructing knowledge itself
What is there Discrepancy between when it comes to measuring babies knowledge and toddlers knowledge?
Early looking data and later search errors
Infants Toddlers
What are 4 main reasons for Search Errors?
-Searching in the wrong place for an object at toddler age despite having the knowledge at infant age
1- Limited problem-solving abilities
2- Frontal cortex immaturity
3- Early representations are implicit
4- Weaker representations that are sufficient to perform in looking tasks, but not in manual retrieval
Which term is this model of cognitive development a reflection of?
Representational Re-description
-children/ infants have knowledge implicitly, but cannot verbalise or act on it until transformed into explicit knowledge to be used in tasks
Can infants understand gravity:
Role of experience of playing with and placing objects
Infants have a gradual mastery during the 1st year of when objects should be held up/ fall to the ground
What happens at each stage as infants grow:
Contact/no contact
Type of contact
Amount of contact
Proportional distribution
Contact/no contact
At 3 months infants will look for longer (surprised) if object is pushed off/ not supported by stage
Type of contact
However, at 4.5/ 5 months infants (f/m) willl look for longer if just touching the side of the stage (surprised
Amount of contact
At 6.5 months infants detect a violation in the little amount of contact (just touching the stage) in trial above
Proportional distribution
At 12.5 months infants now understand the proportion of object
asymmetric object -50% is on the table should look for longer
What is the missing word?
In their first pass at understanding physical events, infants construct … that capture the essence of the events but few of the details. With further experience, these initial core representations are progressively elaborated.
all-or-none representations
Children’s naïve (intuitive) theories:
Conceptual frameworks children spontaneously generate to make explanations and predictions about the world
Name 2 examples:
Simplifications
Misunderstandings
Resistant to counter evidence
-Overgeneralisations in grammar (I founded it)
Children’s naïve (intuitive) theories
The Gravity Error via Tubes task
Children infer that trajectory of invisibly falling object will fall straight down or to their logical component of the tube?
Tubes task
Persistent error at 2-3yrs
fall straight down
-more experience of objects dropping straight down, they build up this naïve theory
However, in another condition where toddlers were shown a reverse video (ball being sucked up tube), they did not have this trajectory of invisibility that objects should always travel up in straight lines
Summary:
Opaque vs. transparent tubes? Fail on Opaque tubes
Up vs. down motion? Fail on down motion
Naïve theory: All things must balance in the centre
Children learning about support relations in the balance scale problem (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992)
U-shaped behavioural performance in balancing asymmetrical blocks (Karmiloff-Smith and Inhelder 1975)
4- 5-year-olds perform well by trial and error
At this point they did not have a naive theory of balancing objects
6- 7-year-olds fail the task
as they rigidly stick to a naïve ‘centre theory’ of balance
8- 9-year-olds perform well are flexible and switch strategy when evidence contradicts their ‘centre theory’
knowledge has become explicit
Knowledge of object use:
What age do children begin to know about conventional object properties such as the functional use of objects?
At approx. 1 year old, begin exhibiting object function through action:
Begin to show correct use of everyday objects
(e.g. bringing spoon to mouth)
Play with objects functionally
(e.g. bring cup to mouth, insert key in lock)
They analysed where infants looked during the lifting phase of the stimuli and compared the frequency of anticipatory looks to the target area when infants watched a functional vs. non-functional object-goal combination
(e.g. looks to the mouth when actor lifts cup vs. brush).
What were the findings when shown video stimuli of people using these objects correctly (Functional conditioning)
/ incorrectly (Non-functional conditioning)?
Found longer-looking preference during the lifting phase (anticipation of stimuli) was directed at the functional conditioning (correct) condition = eg. looks to the mouth when actor lifts cup
Displayed from 6months
recognise phone and cup (negative for brush)
Suggests at this age, they know which actions are associated with which objects for 2 everyday objects – phone and cup (brush results were negative)
