What Is It Like To Be a Baby? lecture

Why Study Development?

• provides guidance for parents & pediatricians

• infant is a simpler “model organism” to understand the mature mind

  • help understand origins of our mind, why we come to see the world as we do

Empiricism

• John Locke

• all of what we do is furnished through experience

• mind is void until we experience something ~ learning is required

Nativism

• Descartes

• we come to know about the world by our own native intelligence, without any sensory experience

  • at least some of what we know is innate product of evolution, present at birth

Visual Cliff

• Eleanor Gibson

• baby on plexiglass, one side has pattern immediately under, one has pattern feet below

• babies prefer the shallow side ~ can perceive depth even without experience

• other animals, just hours after birth, do the same (goat, chick) ~ innate

Visual Cliff: Rats

• dark-reared and light-reared rats showed the same activity

• dark-reared had never seen anything so couldn’t have known anything about depth

Learning is…

• still important ~we need to use innate abilities to make decisions about what is safe / make judgments about depth

Depth Judgments to Assess Risk

• Karen Adolph

• 9 months, perceives depth but still falls down slope

• 11 months correctly judges risk

• learns to walk

• 13 months fails again to judge risk in newfound ability

• ~ babies automatically perceive depth, but have to learn risk and reassess risk in new postures

Knowledge: Performance v. Competence

• a baby may know something (object permanence) but the task testing their ability is too hard for other reasons (motor capacity, memory)

• make the task easier

Accurate Test of Babies’ Knowledge

• look longer at things that violate their expectations / when something “impossible” happens

Violates Expectations = Look Longer

• object floats in mid-air

• object passes through solid wall

• object breaks into pieces

• show that babies have innate expectations

• babies play more and learn better with violators

Avian Imprinting

• undermines challenge that babies learned quickly about object permanence

• chicks follow the thing they imprinted on, and know that it is still behind a wall when it is hidden from them

• shows permanence is innate

Number

• innate in animals: know to track friends and locate best places to forage

Number: Change Detection

• look longer at changing things than static things

• can tell difference between quantities of dots, and look longer when there are more ratio discrepancies

• newborns recognize addition (know 10 + 10 is not 20)

• born with intuitive sense of approximate number

Learning Builds on Innate Abilities

• must see depth to know whats safe

• must know stuff about objects to learn how to interact with them

• must perceive quantities to learn number symbols

Core Knowledge of Number

born with intuitive sense of approximate number, but must learn more about those numbers and how they interact with each other

Core Knowledge

• depth

• objects

• number

• spaces and places

• other’s minds