HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 1 PSYCHOLOGY 3050: Spatial Cognition Ch 8

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HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 1PSYCHOLOGY 3050Spatial
Cognition (Ch 8)

• Dr. Jamie Drover
• SN-3094, 737-8383
• e-mail -- jrdrover_at_mun.ca
• Winter Semester, 2009

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Objects are Continuous, Solid, and Require Support

• Baillargeon et al. (1995) investigated whether
  infants understood that objects need support
  using the violation-of-expectations paradigm.
• An infants reaction to an unexpected event is
  used to infer what he/she knows.
• Infants were shown a possible and an impossible
  event reflecting the notion of support.

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Objects are Continuous, Solid, and Require Support

• 3-month-old infants werent surprised with the
  impossible outcome.
• 6.5-month-olds expect the box to fall unless a
  large portion maintains contact with the platform.

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Objects are Continuous, Solid, and Require
Support

• Initially, infants believe that any contact
  between two objects is enough for one to support
  the other.
• They progress until they reach an adult-like
  concept of support.
• However, 2.5-year-old children will fail on a
  similar task (see Hood et al., 2000 p. 215).

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Objects are Continuous, Solid, and Require
Support
Familiarize
(a)
(b)
(c)
Test event Where is The ball?
Hood et al. (2000) study with 2- and 2.5-yr-olds
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Objects are Continuous, Solid, and Require
Support

• Perhaps the difference in the nature of the tasks
  explain these findings.
• That is, 2-year-olds need to demonstrate an
  explicit understanding of spatial relations,
  whereas infants need only display and implicit
  understanding.

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Object Permanence

• Infants as young as 3.5 months possess more
  knowledge than Piaget proposed.
• Some believe object permanence is innate.
• Baillargeon (1987) studied this using the
  violation-of-expectation method (p 216).
• 3.5- and 4.5-month-old infants were habituated to
  a screen moving 180 in space.
• A block was then placed behind the screen to
  produce an impossible event.

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Object Permanence
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Object Permanence

• No differences were found for the control
  condition.
• In the experimental condition, infants looked
  longer at the impossible event.
• They believed the block continued to exist when
  out of their sight and were surprised when the
  screen dropped.
• They have knowledge of object permanence and that
  one solid cant pass through another.

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Object Permanence

• Newcombe et al. (1999) buried a toy in a sandbox
  in front of 5-month-olds, and then dug it out 10
  sec later.
• After multiple trials, the object was dug out
  from 6 inches away.
• Infants looked significantly longer at these
  trick trials.
• They werent surprised when a different object
  was dug out of this location.

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Object Permanence

• Newcombe et al (1999) tried a similar task with
  toddlers.
• They watched as a toy was hidden in the sandbox
  and then had to move to the opposite end of the
  box and then find the toy.
• They could not solve the task until 21 months.
• This may be because the task requires explicit
  understanding.

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Is Infants Object Knowledge Innate?

• Infants may come into the world with substantive
  beliefs about objects.
• Representational innateness (Neonativist).
• Infants may possess three core principles of
  innate knowledge about objects.
• Cohesion objects have boundaries and their
  components stay connected to one another.

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Is Infants Object Knowledge Innate?

• Continuity an object moves from one location to
  another in a continuous path and cannot be in the
  same place as another object.
• Contact objects must make contact with other
  objects in order to make them move.
• Perhaps infants are born with highly constrained
  mechanisms for dealing with objects.
• Architectural innateness (neonativist).

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Is Infants Object Knowledge Innate?

• Infants have an all-or-none knowledge at first,
  but over time reach and adult level understanding
  (Baillargeon, 1994).
• Bogartz et al (1998) argue that it is not
  necessary to use innate knowledge of objects to
  explain infants looking behavior.
• Infants acquire object knowledge through
  perceptual experience.

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Is Infants Object Knowledge Innate?

• This perceptual processing produces the looking
  patterns others interpret as innate knowledge.
• Perceptual processing takes time.
• Novel events (impossible events) simply take
  longer to process because initial encoding of the
  stimuli needs to be done.
• This takes time and results in longer loking
  times.