Baillargeon’s Explanation Of Early Infant Abilities

Question 1

What is Baillargeon’s main criticism of Piaget’s theory?

Answer 1

Object permanence

Question 2

What is the physical reasoning system? (PRS)

Answer 2

Understanding of how the physical world works (e.g. the knowledge that things continue to exist even when out of sight aka object permanence)

Question 3

What is Violation of Expectation research? (VOE)

Answer 3

Technique based on the idea that infants will show surprise when witnessing an impossible event

Question 4

What does Baillargeon believe?

Answer 4

Infant’s abilities are innately driven as humans are born with a PRS (hardwired with basic understanding of the physical world and the ability to learn easily)

Question 5

Why is it difficult to test intelligence of infants?

Answer 5

Infants can’t easily indicate what they are thinking, so lack of ability could be due to motor or attention difficulties instead of mental abilities.

Question 6

What technique did Baillargeon develop?

Answer 6

Violation of Expectation (VOE) method

Question 7

What are the two typical conditions of VOE research?

Answer 7

1) Visible toy condition - expected event
2) Toy hidden out of sight - unexpected event (which is a violation of expectation)

Question 8

What were the findings of Baillargeon and Graber’s (1987) VOE experiment?

Answer 8

Infants looked at the impossible event for an average of 33.07s
Infants looked at the possible event for an average of 25.11s

Question 9

What’s a criticism of Baillargeon’s research?

Answer 9

You can’t definitively make the assumption that the reaction of the infants is due to the fact that they know the unexpected event shouldn’t be happening (e.g. it could just be more interesting)