What is it like to be a baby? Flashcards
Why study babies? (aka developmental psychology)
Provide guidance for parents + pediatricians: tracking baby’s milestone and know if they are on course or not for appropriate development
Use infants as a “model organism” → study their development as a way to understand broader biological, cognitive, or behavioral processes (use babies to understand development)
Want to understand WHY we see the world as we do? (the ORIGINS of our thinking and how does experience add onto it)
comparative psychology
the study of animals
the branch of psychology that studies the similarities and differences in behavior across different species, particularly animals, with the goal of understanding both animal and human behavior
- gives insight to evolution as well
John Locke’s view?
Empiricism→ experiences from learning makes each person unique (sensory experience)
- mind is a blank slate and how it comes to be furnished is through experience
Rene Descartes’s view?
Nativism → what we know about the world is our own native intelligence without ANY sensory experience
Who was correct: John Locke or Rene Descartes?
both were right!
Where does knowledge come from? (3 topics covered in lecture)
depth perception
object permanence beliefs
numbers
what was the visual cliff experiment and who conducted it?
Eleanor Gibson
tested infants who had just learned to crawl: placed the babies on the shallow side of the table and encouraged them to crawl across the glass to their mothers who stood on the deep side
Majority of the infants refused to crawl onto the deep side
Animals (ie. kittens: a few weeks, goats: a day after birth, chick: a few hours after birth, and rats) also avoided the deep side as soon as they were mobile
Significance: depth perception is present in both human infants and many animals from very early stage of development → suggests that depth perception is not learned purely through experience but is at least partially INNATE
What was the controlled rearing experiment?
Light reared rats: born with light and visual cues
Dark reared rats: born and kept in darkness their entire lives with no visual cues
Both introduced to the visual cliff again → Results show that the two categories of rats were INDISTINGUISHABLE and both went to the shallow side → visual depth perception (at least in rats) is innate
what does learning to use depth judgements to assess risk mean?
Babies automatically perceive depth BUT still have to learn what is safe/risky (accurate risk assessment) and relearn this in every new posture (crawling vs walking)
What is object permanence?
object permanence: is an object still there if it is hidden and out of sight?
what does performance vs competence mean?
just because infants cannot show object permanence knowledge does not necessarily mean they have no knowledge of it –> may be because the task they tested with infants was not capable of but with other tasks, could show understanding of object permanence
What is a helpful tool for conducting object permanence experiments with infants?
Helpful tool: infants tend to look longer at things that are surprising than things that are expected
Babies play more with surprising objects, and even learn better about them!
Young babies look longer when an object seems to magically disappear (or appear)!
Ex. object passes through solid barrier, object floats in mid air, object breaks into pieces
what is violation of object expectation and how to babies react to them?
Violation of Object Expectation: young babies look longer when… it defies their expectations of how the world should work
- An object seems to magically disappear or appear
- Object floats in mid-air
- Object breaks into pieces
What is avian imprinting for chicks?
about 24 hours a chick hatches, they look for a midsized moving object (usually the mother hen, but in lab environment: a moving robot) and immediately IMPRINTS on it and FOLLOWS it intensely
Chick with cylinder “mom” experiment
Place hatched chicken in a box with only another object (a cylinder) → chicken imprints on it and always has it in view
On the test day, block the cylinder “mom” with cardboard → chick still runs around the cardboard to its “mom” → knows INNATELY that an object is still even if it is hidden from view
Significance: object knowledge appears early in humans and is innate in chicks → so object permanence is potentially and likely INNATE in humans as well
- learning and experience layer onto this innate ability
