Baillargeon Explanation of Early Infant Abilities

Cognition and Development Psychology

Let's recap the definition of cognition and development in psychology and how this relates to the Baillargeon explanation of early infant abilities.

Baillargeon's research highlights the role of nature factors rather than nurture factors in determining an infant's ability.

Describe and Evaluate Baillargeon's Explanation of Early Infant Abilities

Baillargeon believes infants are born with a physical reasoning system (PRS).

Baillargeon believes humans are born with this hard-wired ability which continues to develop over time.

Baillargeon refers to an infant's understanding of the physical world as physical reasoning or object performance. From a few weeks of age, an infant has physical reasoning or object performance, recognising that an object exists even though it is not in sight.

Baillargeon suggests that an infant's understanding of the physical world and object knowledge is better than initially thought by other researchers such as Piaget.

Baillargeon developed ways of measuring early infant abilities by creating research methods to measure cognitive abilities in infants.

Strengths of Baillargeon's Explanation of Early Infant Abilities

Some of the strengths of the theory are as follows:

• Many studies have replicated the findings of Baillargeon. For example, studies have replicated findings that infants look longer at unexpected events, which indicates surprise and expectation to see objects. Such research aligns with BBaillargeon'sbelief that infants can understand concepts of an object existing without being present.

• Baillargeon is credited with finding a way to measure infant ability (the time they spend looking at an event). In contrast, Piaget believed that infants' looking away in his studies indicated the infant no longer knew an object existed and did not consider factors such as losing attention.

• Baillargeon believes that humans are born with physical reasoning abilities, which continue to develop over time. This belief is also consistent with what is known about other infant abilities, such as distance perception, which is also thought to be innate but developed over time.

Criticisms of Baillargeon's Explanation of Early Infant Abilities

Now let's move on to discuss the weaknesses of the theory.

• A criticism of this is that an assumption is made about infant abilities in the physical world. Infants looking at the event where the object did not appear may not be a strong measure that the infants were expecting to see the object. Therefore, an infant's abilities in the physical world can be considered difficult to measure.

• Baillargeon's explanation states that infants were born with the ability to process the concept of the physical world. However, research on newborns' abilities in the physical world is limited, thus questioning the theory's credibility.

• The explanation ignores the role of the environment in an infant's development. Baillargeon'sexplanation does not consider factors such as the frequency with which an infant is exposed to various objects, how much he is moved, and parental style.

• The explanation contrasts with Piaget'sexplanation of early infant abilities. Piaget believed that young infants are unaware that objects exist once they have left the visual field. The inconsistent views suggest low reliability.

Conclusion on Baillargeon's Explanation of Early Infant Abilities

In conclusion, Baillargeon's explanation of early infant abilities has contributed towards developmental psychology and has been considered a credible theory by some psychologists.

Despite criticisms of research and the theory, Baillargeon nonetheless invented research methods to measure early infant abilities and replicated her findings repeatedly.

Violation of Expectation Paradigm

Baillargeon introduced a concept referred to as the violation of expectation method to discover more about an infant's understanding of the physical world.

In the violation of expectation research Baillargeon initially conducted, infants witness an event and are then exposed either to a possible or impossible event.

The researchers measured how surprised or whether they expected the event by measuring how long they looked at the event.

Fif. 1. The researchers investigated surprise at unexpected events by measuring the length of time looking at the event.

Violation of Expectation Paradigm: Research and Findings

Baillargeon and Graber experimented with testing the paradigm involving a possible and impossible event.

The participants were shown recordings of possible and impossible events, and the researchers measured how long the infants looked at the events.

The study found:

The findings showed that infants looked at the unexpected event for a longer time, indicating that the infants expected to see the rabbits even when not in sight.

Other research on the violation of expectation has also replicated these findings using alternative possible vs impossible events, such as the drawbridge experiment.

Violation of Expectation Paradigm: Criticisms

The criticisms are as follows:

• 11 out of 15 studies supporting BBaillargeon'sexplanation of early infant ability (violation of expectation paradigm) Baillargeon conducted herself and former students. This aspect questions potential researcher bias, i.e. to what extent Baillargeon links the findings to her beliefs on innate validity.

• This issue also highlights the lack of supporting external research conducted on Baillargeon's violation of the expectation paradigm. Researchers Bogartz, Shinskey and Schilling (2000) found that infants did not look longer at the unexpected event for longer when replicating the violation of expectation.

• Other psychologists have criticised the theory, such as Schoner and Thelen. They argued that there might be several interfering factors within the research studies as to why infants may have looked longer at the unexpected event.