Baillargeon's Explanation of Infant Abilities

Violation of Expectation: If children have an understanding of the physical world then they will expect certain things to happen in specific situations. If these things do not happen then they will act accordingly, e.g. surprise.

A: To overcome methodological issues in Piaget's research regarding object permanence (she called this object persistance)

P: 24 infants aged 5-6 months saw a tall and short rabbit pass behind the screen. Habituation stage: Both rabbits pass behind screen with no window to familiarise infants with stimuli. Possible event: Tall rabbit seen passing window, small one cannot be seen. Impossible event: Neither rabbit can be seen passing window.

F: Infants stared at impossible event for 8 seconds longer on average. 

C: Infants were surprised at impossible event as it violated their expectations - they knew the tall rabbit should have been seen at the window - hence why they stared for longer, showing an understanding of object permanence.

• Babies are born with a physical reasoning system (PRS)
• This means we hard-wired or born with an innate basic understanding of the physical world and the ability to learn new things quickly
• Becomes more sophisticated as learn from experiences
• Develop event categories in the first few weeks of life, e.g. occlusion, support and containment
• Occlusion = one object can block another
• Support = an object won't fall if supported by a solid object
• Containment = an object will stay inside a container unless it is removed
• Impossible even catches their attention because their PRS means they are predisposed to attend to new events that might further their understanding of the physical world

Double bind design 

• Two observers didn't know whether the infant was observing a possible or impossible event
• Therefore unable to have their observations influenced by prior knowledge of what the infant was watching
• Avoids experimenter bias and demand characteristics 

Parents

• Instructed to keep their eyes closed and not interact with their child who was sat on their lap
• Prevented them from unconsciously communicating cues about how they should react
• Means that an extraneous variable was controlled so that it doesn't become a confounding variable

VOE compared to Piaget

• Piaget assumed that when an infant stopped looking for an object it was due to lack object permanence when it could have been a lack of motor skills to do so
• VOE eliminates confounding variable

Hard to judge what an infant understands

• Baillargeon's research clearly shows that infants look longer at impossible events
• However what it actually shows is that infants behave as we would expect them to if they understood the physical world

Two problems with this:

• We are guessing how the infant might behave when confronted with VOE - might not actually look at impossible events for longer than possible events so in effect we are operationalising surprise as the length of time the baby looks at VOE with evidence
• Although babies look at different events for different lengths of time it only shows that they merely see them as different - there are many reasons why they find one event more interesting that is unrelated to VOE

These problems suggest there are issues with the validity of VOE.