Baillargeon

Baillargeon’s research focus

Focuses on understanding how developed cognitive abilities are in infancy

Baillargeon believes…

Rather than lacking mental abilities, infants can’t plan and execute the necessary motor actions

Even very young babies have a fairly well-developed understanding of the physical world, including object permanence (3-4months)

Which psychologist’s work does Baillargeon challenge

Piaget’s ideas about a sensorimotor stage

Baillargeon’s violation of expectation research

Many different examples- early one:

procedure:

• 24 infants aged 5-6 months old

• Habituation/familiarisation stage: infant watches a moving apparatus a number of times- watch different sized rabbits move along a track behind a screen

• Test events stage:

  • Possible (non-magical) events- when the small rabbit passes the window it is not visible as too small but when tall rabbit passes it is visible

  • Impossible (magical events)- small rabbit is shown in the window OR tall rabbit is not visible

• Findings looked at impossible event for 33.07s vs possible event 25.11 seconds.

• Conclusions: Researchers interpreted that the infants were surprised by the impossible condition- hence staring for longer

demonstrates an understanding of object permanence at 5-6months. Otherwise they would not have been surprised to see the small rabbit/not see the tall rabbit

Baillargeon’s theory of infant physical reasoning

• infants are primarily equipped with mechanisms to interpret and learn from experience - physical reasoning system (PRS)

• Meaning we are hard-wired with a basic understanding of the physical world and the ability to learn more details easily

How does Baillargeon’s concept of the PRS differ from Piaget’s view

Piaget suggested that everything is learnt through interaction- there are no innate mechanisms to assist this

Where Baillargeon suggests that infants are born with innate mechanisms which give them a head start

What did Baillargeon propose about the PRS?

When infants learn to reason about novel physical phenomenon they first form an all-or-none concept.

Later they add to this in terms of other variables that may affect the concept

Baillargeon research example of how the PRS develops

Unveiling principle

• Infants showed a cover with a bulge- suggesting object underneath

• Aged 9.5 months-

  • showed surprise when cover is removed and nothing under it

  • Did not show surprise if the object revealed was much smaller than the bulge suggested

• 12.5 months- did show surprise when object was smaller than bulge suggested

Which suggests…

• Infants first learns concept that a bulge indicates an object

• Then they later identify variables that affects that concept (e.g. size)

same process occurs for all physical relations - understand concept then incorporate variables

Violation of expectation

What expected is not what happens

This research technique is based on the idea that an infant will show surprise when witnessing an impossible event

AO3- issues

P- one issue with Baillargeon’s theory is that the research supporting it has several methodological issues

E- is the VOE method actually measuring what it intends to measure (internal validity)?

Issues with reliance on inference- we are inferring we can never know what a baby actually understands nor how a baby might actually behave in response to a VOE- problems with assessing cognise processing in young infants

E- validity of DV- questions about looking at time as a valid measure of surprise and use of surprise to infer object permanence- may be a number of reasons why they found one scene more interesting than the other

L - reduces validity of Baillargeon’s theory

AO3- methodology

P- carefully controlled methodology

EE- Baillargeon’s Babies selected from birth announcements in local paper, whereas Piaget’s all middle class children (his own and his colleagues)- less biased sample, higher population validity

Overseers watched the babies only- could not see whether they were observing possible or magical event- double blind - less biased

When babies were tested they sat on mum’s lap, mum told to close her eyes and not interact with infant- eliminate unconscious communication cues about how baby should react

L- increases overall validity of the findings

AO3- alternatives

P- a weakness of Baillargeon thatvit differs to previous research by Piaget

E- Baillargeon suggests that children are born with innate mechanisms (physical reasoning system) which gives them a head start. By contrast Piaget suggests that everything lies learned by interaction - there are no innate mechanisms to assist with this . For example Baillargeon believes infants develop object permanence at 3-4 months whereas Piaget suggests that they have learned object permanence through interactions with the environment and trial and error sensory experiences

E - it has been argued by Bremner that demonstrating object permanence (being surprised at the impossible) task does not imply that the infant has a real understanding of it . For Piaget cognitive development involved understanding a principle, not just acting in accordance to it as Baillargeon’s research shows.

L- suggests that Baillargeon may only have shown that Piaget underestimated infant ability rather than disprove his views.

Weakens Baillargeon’s theory