Infant cognition Flashcards
What are the principles of habituation? Based on these, how do particular experimental designs allow for certain conclusions?
Habituation method is the most basic and efficient method for experimental developmental psychology.
When infants first encounter an object, they have a familiarity preference. This lasts for a length of time depending on the complexity of the stimulus.
Once they’ve worked it out and habituated, they develop a novelty preference. They don’t just habituate to the specifics of the object, but to patterns also and can generalise to other objects and be automatically habituate to them also (eg: faces)
What are the arguments for constructivism vs nativism and how does the data support or not support such arguments?
Current picture: innate = innate knowledge of specific domains and domain-specific learning mechanisms, constructivist = no innate knowledge but domain-general learning mechanisms
What’s the difference between object permanence and object unity?
Object unity is the ability to represent parts of objects that are unseen
Object permanence is the ability to understand that things exist even though they cannot be seen
What are the nativist and constructivist arguments for object unity?
Piaget claimed infants can’t do this kind of thing until 8-9 months
Moving rod experiment - 4 month olds were habituated to a partly occluded rod. The test stimuli were either a complete rod or broken rod. The 4 onth olds were much more interested in the broken rod (novelty preference) than than complete one, which suggests they had represented a unified one during habituation (unlike what Piaget predicted).
Constructivists reply - kids interact with all kinds of object permanence in all kinds of daily situations, so by 4 months they could have developed it, not innate from birth. Studied 2 month olds and found they only saw rod as unified when a large area of the rod was showing during occlusion. Studied newborns and found they preferred (novelty) complete rod in all situations, so it ain’t innate LOL.
Nativists came back and said 2 month olds just weren’t used to the motion yet, and say motion is gradually developed and then allows innate object core knowledge to be applied
What are the nativist and constructivist arguments for object permanence?
The main question - do infants understand that objects exist that they cannot see?
Violation of expectation paradigm - will kids prefer something unfamiliar yet possible, or something familiar yet impossible? Study involved habituating infants to a trap-door device opening and closing. 4-5 month olds then preferred the familiar, yet impossible event. Perhaps they were just showing familiarity/complexity preference though?
With object permanence, memory for perceptual features pre-dates a more complete understanding of permanence.
What are the principles of constructivism? (hint: think in terms of ‘units’)
1) There are innate domain-general systems such as colour and motion detection
2) Higher level units are formed from relations between these systems
3) Higher level units are formed from relations between these units etc.
Infants use the highest level units to interpret their environment, if it gets too tough/overloaded, they revert to lower levels of processing.
Outline the study that supports the nativist view of causal learning.
Leslie (1984). The main question is whether the 6 month olds will just see a collection of spatial/temporal features, or actually make causal connections between objects.
4 scenarios - direct launching event, launching with collision, delayed launch, delayed without collision.
2 groups - Group 1 were habituated to a causal event, then their test trial was a non-causal event, which they ended up habituating to. Group 2 was habituated to a non-causal event, then their test trial was another non-causal event, which they habituated to also.
It is clear the infants were responding in terms of causal status. Group 1 habituated to a non-causal after a causal and group 2 generalised their habituation from one non-causal to another non-causal.
What was the constructivist reply for causal learning?
They say causal perception emerges from lower level features. They used richer objects, not small cubes. It was expected familiar objects would have a shorter looking time than novel non-causal events, but they found no significant difference.
In summary, 6 month olds can do it with simple objects, 10 month olds can do it with complex objects, and 15 month olds can do it with complex objects that vary on every trial. How could a nativist explain such developmental progression?
