Summary Baillargeon infant abilities notes and evaluation
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Course
Cognitive development
Institution
AQA
I am a Psychology A-Level student and these are my notes on Baillargeon infant abilities as well as their evaluation. I have bullet-pointed AO3 evaluation and these are easy to evaluate
Baillargeon’s explanation of early infant abilities
Early research on knowledge of the physical world:
Piaget believed babies less than 8 months old have primitive knowledge of the world around
us, because he made conclusions from his research such as babies aren’t aware objects still
exist after they leave the visual field.
Later psychologists have criticised the conclusions saying that babies may not have the motor
skills yet to pursue the hidden object, or they may lose interest due to selective attention not
being well developed.
Baillargeon (1980s) suggested, based on alternative research methods, younger babies may
have better developed understanding of the physical world than previously thought, so she
developed the violation of expectation method (VOE) to investigate infant
understanding of the world.
Violation of expectation research
If children understand how the world operates then
they will expect things to happen in certain
situations. If these things do not happen, and they
react accordingly, it is said that they have an
understanding of that situation.
For example, when the VOE method is used to test
object permanence, infants will see 2+ conditions
where objects pass in and out of sight. Control
(possible) condition: object behaves in line with expectations of person with object
permeance. 2nd (impossible) condition: object behaves in an unexpected, seemingly
impossible way.
Rabbit occlusion study (tests object permanence):
Procedure – 24 infants aged 5-6 months were shown a tall and a short rabbit pass behind a
screen with a window. In the possible condition, the tall rabbit can be seen passing the
window, but the short one can’t. in the impossible condition, neither rabbit was seen passing
the window.
Findings – infants looked for an average of 33.07secs at the impossible event, compared to
25.11secs at the possible one. This was interpreted to mean they were surprised at the
impossible condition. To be surprised, they must have known that the tall rabbit was meant to
reappear at the window, demonstrating an understanding of object permanence.
Baillargeon’s theory of infant physical reasoning
Humans are born with a physical reasoning system (PRS), meaning we are born with a basic
understanding of the physical world and the ability to learn more details easily. One feature of
the world which we have an understanding of from birth is object persistence/object
permanence.
In the first few weeks of life infants begin identifying event categories. Each category
corresponds to one way in which objects interact. E.g. occlusion events take place when one
object blocks the view of another. By the time they are tested in tasks like Baillargeon and
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