Describe how looking time methods used in empirical studies have furthered our understanding of infants cognitive abilities
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As experimental techniques have improved so has our understanding of infant abilities. Describe how ‘looking time methods’ used in empirical studies have furthered our understanding of infants’ cognitive abilities.
It used to be a common assumption that an infant came into the world as a “tabulae rasae”, a blank slate as it were and that they were cognitively capable of very little, acting only on a set of innate reflexes (Locke, 1689). Locke’s beliefs were that an infant’s knowledge and cognitive processes derive from experience and exposure to the environment alone. Piaget was one of the first to challenge these ideas about infant cognition. Though children do gain perceptual knowledge of the world around them through a process of adaptation via constant interaction with environmental stimuli, the foundations behind their basic cognition is innate. Infants build on their own schematic knowledge and innate abilities to make sense of the world around them. Piaget’s theory suggests infants have a limited understanding of the physical world. They appear to lack the understanding of object permanence, have no concept of object perception and are incapable of recall from memory, (Piaget, 1938, 1959). All of these claims have been disputed by more recent research however and criticisms are high with Piaget’s methodology. Contrary to Piaget’s view it appears infants do perceive an objective world and are even aware of the basic rules governing object relations. There is much evidence to suggest infant capabilities go way beyond early assumptions and due to changes in methods used to study early infant cognition it is an unprecedented assumption today that an infant is born a blank slate. Looking time methods are one of the preferred methods used to research and observe early infant cognition. This essay shall be discussing three of these methods; preferential looking procedures, habituation techniques and violation of expectation methods, discussing whether or not findings can indicate early infant cognitive abilities and what conclusions can be drawn from such research.
It has been found premature babies as early as twenty-six weeks gestation are able to discriminate between light and dark and have been found to be capable of following a moving object with their gaze, (Bremner, 2012) but is what they are seeing merely blobs of light and moving blurs, or are they able to distinguish visual forms? Preferential looking procedures consist of an infant being presented with two stimuli simultaneously with their looking time being observed and recorded. It is assumed that if an infant looks at one stimulus longer than the other this is an indication of visual preference. Using this technique Fantz (1961) was able to establish infants have a preference for patterned stimuli over plain thus providing evidence to justify that infants can discriminate between the two stimuli. Results differed dependent on the age of the infant but this may be attributed to the biological factor that visual acuity does not reach full maturation until approximately six months of age. The findings suggest that some basic degree of form perception is an innate capability; however the fact that visual preference and discriminative ability is dependent on the age of the infant, suggests that environmental factors have an influence at a later stage of development.
Fantz, (1961) was also interested to discover whether infants are capable of active selective perception which would suggest that they are capable of making sense of the visual forms they perceive. He used human facial configuration as the stimulus in his study on the basis that facial pattern is the most distinctive aspect of a person. It is also the most reliable way of distinguishing an individual from another object. Three flat objects were used similar in shape and size to that of a human face. On one was painted a stylized face in black on a pink ...
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Fantz, (1961) was also interested to discover whether infants are capable of active selective perception which would suggest that they are capable of making sense of the visual forms they perceive. He used human facial configuration as the stimulus in his study on the basis that facial pattern is the most distinctive aspect of a person. It is also the most reliable way of distinguishing an individual from another object. Three flat objects were used similar in shape and size to that of a human face. On one was painted a stylized face in black on a pink background with easily identifiable features. The second had the features rearranged into a scrambled configuration and on the third was painted an amount of solid black equal to the amount used on the previous “faces”. Features were made large enough for visual acuity to not be a factor in the study and forty-nine infants were tested with their age ranging from four days to six months old. It was found that a strong visual preference to the human facial configuration existed for all ages. Preference was stronger for the younger infants suggesting an indication of some basic innate capability of recognizing and distinguishing faces from other objects, (Fantz, 1961). A more recent study failed to replicate these findings however showing infants of twenty-four months old showed no significant preference for schematic faces, (Koopman and Ames, 1968). This may be due to the fact the ability to distinguish between faces declines as an infant matures. Infant attachment studies indicate a strong visual preference to the mothers face when compared to that of strangers, suggesting that this innate capability for facial recognition is vital to serve evolutionary purposes inbuilt for survival, (Bushell, 1989). More research has been done in this area suggesting that there is indeed an innate perceptual process for face recognition, and a specialized area of the brain has been found to be active during these cognitive process giving biological evidence to back Fantz’s (1961) previous findings, (Pascalis, 2002, Kelly et al, 2007).
Habituation techniques are also used to observe infant cognition. An infant is presented with a stimulus, their looking time is recorded then the same stimulus is presented again. It is expected there should be a decrease in looking time on subsequent presentations of the same stimulus, this technique is repeated until the infant habituates to the stimulus. A novel stimulus is then presented and it is observed if the infant dishabituates to the new stimulus. This method is used to establish not only whether an infant is able to discriminate between stimuli but indicates whether they have committed a stimulus to memory and also illustrates their ability to recall. Sokolov, (1963) focused much research around the habituation/dishabituation paradigm. He supported that repeated exposure to a stimulus would enable the infant to create an internal representation of it and therefore habituate to the stimulus. Due to the ability to create an internal representation of an object and discriminate it from that of a different object provides evidence to suggest that infants are actively processing stimuli and attending to it to create schematic information about the world. This suggests infants are capable of learning from past events, retaining it and learning from it. Sokolov, (1963) found during his studies that an infant’s ability to habituate quickly to a stimulus was directly related to that infants learning and encoding ability, infants that habituated more quickly learned more quickly in comparison to infants that habituated much more slowly. (Sokolov, 1963). Later studies support these findings suggesting more than half the variances in IQ in later life might be predicted by habituation, (Rose, Slater and Perry, 1986).
Violation of expectation is used to observe an infant’s perception of the world. It examines their ability to understand cause and effect. They are presented with both a logically viable and logically impossible situation. It is then observed whether an infant looks longer at the impossible situation. If they do it is assumed they understand that the event violates their expectations, therefore meaning they have some ideas about the physical world surrounding them. As stated earlier Piaget (1959) stated infants under the age of eight to nine months of age lack object permanence, the idea that an object still exists even though it cannot be seen. His findings have been criticized saying that he mistakes performance with competence leading him to underestimate infant abilities. In his object retrieval task, an infant below a certain age lacks motor-coordination and may be physically unable to search for an object, it cannot be concluded that this means therefore they believe the object ceases to exist because it’s out of sight. Baillargeon (1987) conducted a violation of expectation experiment and found that three month old infants were aware of an event contradicted their knowledge of the world. She habituated the infants to a truck rolling down a track behind a screen. Once habituated; the screen was removed and a box was placed either on the track, “blocking” the path of the truck, or next to the track causing no obstruction. It was found that the infants looked much longer at the event where the truck continued down the track unimpeded when the box was blocking its path. This contradicts Piaget’s (1959) findings and suggests that the impossible event surprised the infants as it violated their expectations about what they already know about object relations, suggesting that they are well aware of object permanence, (Baillargeon, 1987). Using techniques such as these it has been suggested that infants understand number and discriminate between them, (Starkey and Cooper, 1980) and can even count, (Wynn, 1995). It has been argued however that violation of expectation experiments cannot necessarily tell us that an infant is looking longer because the event contradicts what they expect, but only that they notice a difference; the rest is down to speculation about an infant’s assumptions, (Schoner and Thelen, 2004).
Research into infant cognition is still very current and as technologies improve so will experimental methods. Looking time methods are often criticized as being too presumptuous as researchers are only drawing from their own speculations about the processes and abilities infants hold. More recent studies take advantage of new technologies such as fMRI to confirm or disprove findings which can give more experimental validity to a given theory on infant cognition, (Mather, Cacioppo and Kanwisher, 2013). It can be concluded however that infant capabilities go far beyond what was first assumed in the late 1950’s. Contrary to what Piaget (1959) believed, it has been found that infants can discriminate between patterns, shapes and are able to perceive an objective world. They have fine tuned capabilities some which are better than adults for example in face recognition, (Pascalis, 2002). They are able to discriminate between individuals in the first few hours of life and able to perceive which individuals are important to them, (Bushell, 1989). They also appear to have an understanding of rules and reality of the world in which they live, (Baillargeon, 1987). All these findings indicate that infants are not only able to perceive the world around them but make sense of it suggesting some basic core knowledge is innate and this in turn helps the infant to develop, learn and grow.
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References:
Baillargeon, R. (1987). Object Permanence in 3 ½ and 4 ½ Month Old Infants. Developmental Psychology, 23, 655-664
Cohen, L. and Cashon, C. (2003) Handbook of Developmental Psychology: Infant Perception and Cognition. 3:67
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Mather, M, Cacioppo, J. and Kanwisher, N. (2013) How fMRI Can Inform Cognitive Theories. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 8:1, 108-113. Accessed online via: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3610572/
Kelly et al. (2007). The Other-Race Effect Develops During Infancy. Psychological Science. 18:12, 1084-1089. Accessed online via: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2566514/
Koopman, P. and Ames, E. (1968) Infants Preference for Facial Arrangements: A Failure to Replicate. Child Development. 39:2, 481-487.
Locke, J. (1689). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Book Two. Accessed online via: ftp://ftp.dca.fee.unicamp.br/pub/docs/ia005/humanund.pdf
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