Physical world and spatial cognition Flashcards
How did researchers study infants’ understanding of objects?
Violation of expectation looking time tasks
Unity
Continuity
Solidity
Contact & Inertia
Gravity/ support
What are Violation of expectation looking time tasks?
Habituation or familiarisation followed by two test trials:
Unexpected (an impossible or incongruent scenario)
Expected (a possible or congruent scenario)
What is unity?
Infants infer the boundaries of partly hidden objects by analyzing their movements
What is continuity?
Infants look longer at the two object than one object test in the continuous movement condition (reversed in discontinuous condition)
What is solidity?
Infants think of objects as solid bodies that cannot interpenetrate other objects
What is contact & interia?
Contact = objects need to touch other objects to influence their movement
Interia = objects do not move on their own
What is Gravity/ support?
Infants display surprise when watching a object float
Infants expect unsupported objects to fall down
Describe each system of core knowledge
- operates as a whole, distinct from other systems
- is present throughout lifetime
- Is limited
- Supports further learning
what is the Core knowledge system of objects?
Guides learning and exploration
What are the Signature limits of core object knowledge?
Infants use limited information to track object over occlusion
They seem to fail to encode object features
What are the 2 Frames of reference for representing space?
Egocentric
Allocentric
Describe the egocentric view?
viewer dependant, where objects are represented relative to ones body (e.g. in front of me)
Describe the Allocentric view?
viewer independent, where objects are represented relative to landmarks (e.g. by the door).
Absolute = where objects are represented relative to landscape (e.g. south of the room)
Do infants use the geometric properties of the environment to locate objects?
(Newcombe)
Yes by 5 months
- Researchers used variant of violation of expectation looking time method
- Infants encoded the hiding location with respect to the geometric properties of the environment to encode the location of a hidden object
(Kaufman & Needham)
The authors administer 4 experimental conditions, what are they?
- No change, Pig moves, Infant moves, pig moves and infant moves
- Researchers examined how much infants looked at the object across these conditions to determine if they noticed the change in location of the object
(Kaufman & Needham)
What task did the author’s devise to evaluate spatial representation in infants?
Infants were habituated to an object at a particular place on a table in front of them
(Kaufman & Needham)
What conclusions did they draw from the observed results
- Infants dishabituated in the conditions where pig moved with respects to the table
- Infants are capable of setting up allocentric spatial recognitions (pig movies, pig and infant moves)
What is the Adaption of the disorientation task?
- In the experimental condition (geometry + landmark) toddlers notice the coloured wall
- But they did not use this information when searching for the hidden object
Indicating they failed to combine geometric and non geometric landmark information
Via what mechanism does language affect spatial behaviour in children?
- By helping children understand the relevance of landmarks for encoding locations
- By helping children integrate different forms of spatial information into one representation of space
