PSYC 101 Week 5

Theme 2 Introduction: Focuses on "How do we come to know?" (Cognitive Development).
Piaget’s Theory vs. Core Knowledge:
- Piaget: Believed infants lack Object Permanence (understanding objects exist when out of sight) until ~9 months, evidenced by the A-not-B Error (searching where an object was first hidden, even after seeing it moved).
- Core Knowledge Theory: Proposes that infants are born with "seeds" of knowledge about the physical world. Piaget’s tasks may have been too difficult because they required complex motor skills (reaching), not just mental understanding.
Violation of Expectation (VoE) Paradigm: A research method where infants are shown an "expected" event and an "unexpected/impossible" event. If they look longer at the impossible event, it suggests they have an underlying expectation that was violated.
Early Physical Knowledge: Using VoE, researchers found infants as young as 2–3 months understand:
- Object Permanence: They expect hidden objects to still exist.
- Solidity: They expect that one solid object cannot pass through another.
- Continuity: They expect objects to move in continuous paths.
- Support/Gravity: By 3 months, they expect an object to fall if it is not supported. This understanding becomes more nuanced over the first year (e.g., understanding how much contact is needed for support).

Object Permanence: The knowledge that objects continue to exist even when they are out of view.
A-not-B Error: The tendency to reach for a hidden object where it was last found rather than in the new location where it was last hidden.
Violation of Expectation: A technique used to study infant cognition based on the idea that infants will look longer at events that surprise them or violate their expectations.
Core Knowledge: Innate, evolutionarily ancient skeletal structures of knowledge that get learning started.

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Identifying Social Partners: From birth, infants show a preference for face-like stimuli. They are "tuned" to social agents.
Understanding Goals:
- By 6 months, infants understand that humans have goals. In the Woodward (1998) study, infants were surprised if a hand reached for a new object in the same location, but not if it reached for the same object in a new location.
- They do not attribute goals to inanimate objects (like a mechanical claw) unless that object shows "agent-like" behavior.
Understanding Desires:
- 14-month-olds: Are "egocentric"; they give a researcher what they like (e.g., goldfish crackers) even if the researcher showed a preference for something else (e.g., broccoli).
- 18-month-olds: Can understand that others have different desires and will give the researcher the broccoli if that is what the researcher liked.
Early Moral Intuitions (The "Helper/Hinderer" Study):
- Infants watch a "climber" try to go up a hill. A "helper" pushes them up; a "hinderer" pushes them down.
- Infants as young as 6–10 months prefer the helper character, suggesting a very early "moral sense" or preference for prosocial behavior.
Prosocial Actions: Toddlers show "spontaneous helping" (e.g., picking up a dropped clothespin for an adult) without being asked or rewarded, suggesting they are naturally motivated to help others.

Social Agent: An entity (usually a person) that moves on its own and has internal mental states like goals and intentions.
Agency: The capacity of an entity to act in any given environment.
Prosocial Behavior: Actions intended to benefit others, such as helping, sharing, or comforting.
Altruism: Helping others without any expectation of reward for oneself.
Sticky Mittens Study: An experiment showing that giving 3-month-olds the ability to "act" on objects (using velcro mittens) helps them understand the goal-directed actions of others earlier.