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Young Infants' reasoning about the physical and spatial properties of a hidden object
Abstract
The present experiments examined 7-month-old infants' ability to represent and reason about the physical and spatial properties of an occluded object. In Experiment 1, two groups of infants were tested. One group saw a screen that rotated 90° upwards and then, remaining vertical, slid backwards. The results showed that the infants expected the screen to stop sliding sooner when an object stood 10, as opposed to 25, cm behind it, suggesting that they (a) represented the location of the object behind the screen and (b) used this information to estimate at what point the screen should reach the object and stop. The other group of infants saw a screen that rotated upwards and then backwards, in the manner of a drawbridge. The results showed that the infants expected the screen to stop rotating sooner when an object 20, as opposed to 4, cm-high stood behind it, suggesting that they (a) represented the height of the object behind the screen and (b) used this information to judge at what point the screen should reach the object and stop. The infants in Experiment 2 also saw a screen that rotated upwards and then backwards. The results indicated that the infants expected the screen to stop sooner when an incompressible, as opposed to a compressible, object stood behind it (the two objects were of the same height). This finding suggested that the infants (a) represented the height and the compressibility of the object behind the screen and (b) used this information to determine at what point the screen should reach the object and whether it could continue rotating past this point (by compressing the object). The results of a control experiment supported this interpretation. Together, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that, contrary to Piaget's (1954) claims, 7-month-old infants can represent and reason about the physical and spatial properties of an occluded object. These results have implications for three areas of infancy research: object permanence, physical reasoning, and representation.
... d = 0.19. This kind of interaction effect is common in looking-time studies and has been interpreted as an additive effect of the test condition and the tendency to look longer in earlier trials (e.g., Baillargeon, 1987;Csibra et al., 1999;Mascaro & Csibra, 2012). ...
... These results show that infants tended to look longer to the test event that involved a change in the number or distribution of resources from familiarization (1− 0− 1− 1), albeit this effect was mediated by an interaction with order. Just like in Experiment 1, we documented two additive tendencies governing infants' looking behavior: a tendency to look longer at surprising events, and a tendency to look longer at the event that was presented first (as in: Baillargeon, 1987;Csibra et al., 1999;Mascaro & Csibra, 2012). Overall, these results suggest that the findings of Experiment 1 may have been due to the infants reacting to changes in the number or distribution of rewards across the two experimental phases. ...
For observers the occurrence of a joint action (JA) is inherently ambiguous with respect to the goals of the individuals involved. People may work together, for instance, because they are motivated to obtain material rewards or to help others. We hypothesized that to solve this interpretive ambiguity observers leverage information about the JA’s payoff structure. Specifically, when a JA yields material rewards for a participating agent (as well as their partner), their behavior can be straightforwardly explained as instrumental to the obtainment of these rewards. Conversely, when a JA does not yield material rewards for the agent (but does so for her partner), the unrewarded agent’s contribution needs to be accounted for by positing other types of goals, such as assisting her partner in obtaining her rewards. We examined this hypothesis across three looking-time experiments with 12-month-olds: specifically, we tested whether the absence of material rewards for an agent participating in a JA would prompt infants to interpret her participation as prosocially motivated. Consistent with this hypothesis, Experiment 1 showed that, after having been familiarized to two dyadic JA events resulting in one or both agents being rewarded, infants selectively expected the unrewarded agent to act altruistically towards her former JA partner by giving her a resource. Experiments 2–3 examined whether this expectation was driven by the prosocial interpretation of the unrewarded agent’s behavior or by changes in the number or distribution of resources between familiarization and test. Contradicting the hypothesis that infants interpreted the agent’s behavior as prosocially motivated, in Experiment 2 we observed similar looking times when the unrewarded agent performed a prosocial action (giving) or an antisocial action (taking) towards her partner at test. Further, in a close replication of the original experiment in which the change in the number of familiarized objects occurred in the test event featuring the rewarded agent rather than the unrewarded one (Experiment 3), infants produced a looking-time pattern opposite to the one first obtained. Taken together, these findings suggest that infants encoded the payoff structure of JA events (i.e., the number/distribution of resources that the interaction brought about) but did not leverage this information to infer the individual goals of participating agents. The present evidence calls for a critical re-evaluation of our original hypothesis and for further research into the mechanisms by which infants disambiguate the motives of agents involved in joint actions.
... However, several challenges have arisen to Piaget's notion that objects do not exist for infants unless they can perceive them. Researchers have attempted to circumvent this by measuring infant's visual response to object occlusions in order to investigate object permanence [52,53]. Looking tasks appear to assess more accurately the information that infants gather about the physical properties of objects. ...
All social animals influence each other's behaviour. One area of particular interest is the social interaction that occurs between pets and their owners. Within pet–owner dyads, food and feeding are always part of the dyadic ritual. In this review, we hypothesize that feeding can be considered to be a push–pull relationship where pets are, at least in part, able to 'negotiate' with their owner to influence 'when', 'what' and 'how much' they are fed. We examine the evidence that supports this hypothesis by appraising similar studies of other animals and the pre-verbal human infant. First, we review the differences in approaches and methodologies that exist between disciplines within the behavioural sciences. Second, the feeding behaviour of neonatal wild animals and pre-verbal infants is examined in terms of its causation, ontogeny, phylogeny and adaptation. Finally, the resulting knowledge concerning begging as honest signals of need, scramble competition, re-conciliation and consolation is applied to domestic pets with the objective of understanding of how owners are influenced by the feeding behaviour of their pets. Review Methodology: We searched the following sources: Scopus, Google Scholar, Google Books (keyword search terms used: pet, begging, bird and altruism). In addition we used the references from the articles obtained by this method to check for additional relevant material.
... We should also note that the order effect (i.e., infants looked longer overall at the impossible 180° event only when it was presented first) found, for example, by Baillargeon (1987aBaillargeon ( , 1987b and Baillargeon et al. (1985) was robustly found in our data as well. Thus, the order effect was obtained whether infants were first habituated (as in Baillargeon's experiments) or not (as in the present experiment). ...
Two experiments investigated whether infants would look longer at a rotating “drawbridge” that appeared to violate physical laws because they knew that it was causally impossible, as claimed by R. Baillargeon, E. S. Spelke, and S. Wasserman (1985) and R. Baillargeon (1987a). Using a habituation paradigm, they reported that infants looked longer at a display that appeared impossible (rotated 180° while an obstructing box was behind it) than at one that appeared possible (rotated only 112°, appearing to stop at the box). Experiment 1 eliminated habituation to 180° screen rotations. Still, infants looked longer at the 180° impossible rotations. Critically, however, infants also looked longer at possible 180° rotations in Experiment 2, in which no obstruction was present. Moreover, no difference in effect size was found between the 2 experiments. These findings indicate that infants' longer looking at 180° rotations is due to simple perceptual preference for more motion. They question R. Baillargeon's (1987a) claim that it is due to infants' representational reasoning about physically impossible object permanence events.
... Results from the study generally indicated that infants dishabituated more (looked longer) to the perceptuallyfamiliar/conceptually-impossible display than to the perceptual-novel/conceptuallypossible display. However, there is a robust order effect for this paradigm (Baillargeon, 1987). Specifically, infants' preference for the possible or impossible test display depends on which one is shown first. ...
Nativist and empiricist approaches require foundationalism because they cannot account for the emergence of representation. Foundationalism is the assumption of an innate representational base. In turn, foundationalism places limits on the nature of learning as a constructivist process. In contrast, action-based approaches can account for the emergence of representation through (inter)action. In so doing, action-based approaches can pursue an emergent constructivism for learning and development. Despite the theoretical symmetry between nativism and empiricism with respect to foundationalism, there is an asymmetry in nativist and empiricist research programs. Nativism generally ignores constructivist complexity with rich interpretations that non-nativist approaches assume needs to be investigated empirically. Importantly, the problem of a priori assumptions driving rich interpretations is not specific to nativism or looking methodologies. Mindreading as a research program also engages in rich interpretations for studies that concern social-cognition from infancy through preschool. To the extent that empiricist research programs incorporate constructivist thinking into research, they converge with action-based approaches. This creates a sort of methodological bridge between lean-empiricist research programs and action-based approaches. However, this bridge has limitations that we illustrate through an example concerning maternal mental-state discourse and theory of mind development.
... Intelligent agents are able to discover and learn abstract compositional concepts using little supervision (Baillargeon, 1987;Spelke, 1990;Baillargeon, 2004;Smith & Vul, 2013). Think of human word learning -we acquire the meaning of words through a combination of a continual stream of unsupervised visual data occasionally paired with a corresponding word label. ...
The seemingly infinite diversity of the natural world arises from a relatively small set of coherent rules, such as the laws of physics or chemistry. We conjecture that these rules give rise to regularities that can be discovered through primarily unsupervised experiences and represented as abstract concepts. If such representations are compositional and hierarchical, they can be recombined into an exponentially large set of new concepts. This paper describes SCAN (Symbol-Concept Association Network), a new framework for learning such abstractions in the visual domain. SCAN learns concepts through fast symbol association, grounding them in disentangled visual primitives that are discovered in an unsupervised manner. Unlike state of the art multimodal generative model baselines, our approach requires very few pairings between symbols and images and makes no assumptions about the form of symbol representations. Once trained, SCAN is capable of multimodal bi-directional inference, generating a diverse set of image samples from symbolic descriptions and vice versa. It also allows for traversal and manipulation of the implicit hierarchy of visual concepts through symbolic instructions and learnt logical recombination operations. Such manipulations enable SCAN to break away from its training data distribution and imagine novel visual concepts through symbolically instructed recombination of previously learnt concepts.
... The logic of the looking time method is that subjects will look longer at an unexpected event that violates their expectations than at a control expected event. Looking time measures have been used widely in the developmental literature for decades to test human infants' expectations about both the physical (Baillargeon 1995;Baillargeon 1987;Sobel and Kirkham 2006;Hood et al. 2000, Feigenson et al. 2002Wynn 1992) and social world (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005;Luo and Baillargeon 2007;Luo 2011) and for the last 3 decades have also been used to study expectations in non-human primate subjects both those involving physical objects (e.g., Cheries et al. 2006;De Petrillo and Rosati 2019;Munakata et al. 2001;Santos et al. 2005a, b;Santos and Hauser 2002;Shutts et al. 2009) as well as the actions of social agents (e.g., Arre et al. 2020;Martin and Santos 2014;Horschler et al. 2019;Drayton and Santos 2016;Santos and Hauser 1999). Moreover, several previously published studies have included control conditions that test for deflationary explanations of subjects' performance. ...
A growing body of work demonstrates that a species’ socioecology can impact its cognitive abilities. Indeed, even closely related species with different socioecological pressures often show different patterns of cognitive performance on the same task. Here, we explore whether major differences in social tolerance in two closely related macaque species can impact a core sociocognitive ability, the capacity to recognize what others see. Specifically, we compared the performance of Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus, n = 80) and rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta,n = 62) on a standard test of visual perspective understanding. In contrast to the difference in performance, one might expect from these species’ divergent socioecologies that our results show similar performance across Barbary and rhesus macaques, with both species forming expectations about how another agent will act based on that agent’s visual perspective. These results suggest that differences in socioecology may not play as big of a role in the evolution of some theory of mind capacities as they do in other decision-making or foraging contexts.
... According to Piaget's 6-stage scale of sensorimotor development, human infants may be interested in the movement of objects but they do not search for disappeared objects in the first two stages. In Stage 3, infants may search for disappeared objects visually and they can retrieve objects that were covered partially (Baillargeon 1987). At the beginning of Stage 4, infants can retrieve a totally hidden object if a grasping movement has been initiated at the time of disappearance (Stage 4a), while later (Stage 4b), infants can retrieve a totally hidden object, but they persist searching for the object where they previously found it even though they saw the object hidden in another location (A-not-B or perseveration error) (Piaget 1954). ...
Object permanence is an important skill for cognitive development and is widely employed in comparative psychology. Developing full object permanence by animals is a dilemma to researchers. Similarly, the reasons for the A-not-B error sparked heated debate. To answer these questions, we tested eight hand-raised Azure-winged Magpies (Cyanopica cyanus) on Object permanence with Scale 1 tasks designed by Uzgiris and Hunt (Assessment in infancy: ordinal scales of psychological development, University of Illinois Press, Illinois, 1975). The results indicated that three of the eight Azure-winged Magpies passed all the tasks on Scale 1, providing evidence to support the inhibitory control hypothesis that explains A-not-B error. The current study indicated that the influence of social cues, experiential learning, and associative learning should be carefully considered. We recommend that giving different tasks to subjects of different ages may rule out lower-level factors in large studies. The current study will provide a base for future research on the object permanence of corvids.
... The subject's gaze was recorded with a video camera and the experimenter could view the direction of the monkey's gaze on a television monitor. Comparable to methods used at that time to measure and record human infants' attention to stimuli (e.g., Baillargeon, 1987), in these early tests with primates the experimenter used foot pedals to record the duration of the subject's gaze on each of the two stimuli in real time (Gunderson, Grant-Webster, & Sackett, 1989;Gunderson & Sackett, 1984;Gunderson & Swartz, 1985;Lutz, Lockard, Gunderson, & Grant, 1998). This method was used to investigate monkeys' preferences for facial stimuli (Lutz et al., 1998) and visual pattern recognition (Gunderson & Sackett, 1984;Gunderson & Swartz, 1985;Gunderson et al., 1989).While this method provides a more direct measure of eye gaze than the above-described leverpressing metric, live-scoring a subject's looking behavior is open to errors, experimenter bias, and possibly unintentional experimenter cuing, and no doubt requires a high level of training to achieve expertise and reliability. ...
Over the past 50 years there has been a strong interest in applying eye-tracking techniques to study a myriad of questions related to human and nonhuman primate psychological processes. Eye movements and fixations can provide qualitative and quantitative insights into cognitive processes of nonverbal populations such as nonhuman primates, clarifying the evolutionary, physiological, and representational underpinnings of human cognition. While early attempts at nonhuman primate eye tracking were relatively crude, later, more sophisticated and sensitive techniques required invasive protocols and the use of restraint. In the past decade, technology has advanced to a point where noninvasive eye-tracking techniques, developed for use with human participants, can be applied for use with nonhuman primates in a restraint-free manner. Here we review the corpus of recent studies (N=32) that take such an approach. Despite the growing interest in eye-tracking research, there is still little consensus on "best practices," both in terms of deploying test protocols or reporting methods and results. Therefore, we look to advances made in the field of developmental psychology, as well as our own collective experiences using eye trackers with nonhuman primates, to highlight key elements that researchers should consider when designing noninvasive restraint-free eye-tracking research protocols for use with nonhuman primates. Beyond promoting best practices for research protocols, we also outline an ideal approach for reporting such research and highlight future directions for the field.
Children and adults were tested on 3 place learning tasks. Children under the age of 7 were inferior to older subjects in solving the tasks by using spatial relational solutions, but subjects of all ages were equally proficient in solving the task by using simple stimulus–reward associations (cued solutions). Accurate performance on the cued versions suggests that neither the general response demands nor the large size of testing environments rendered the tasks differentially inappropriate for young children. Instead, the nature of the cognitive demands were responsible for different levels of performance across the age groups. Because, in animal studies, spatial relational solutions but not cued solutions of these tests require mature and undamaged medial temporal lobe structures, the results suggest that these systems are not fully developed in humans before approximately 7 years of age.
Im vorliegenden Kapitel werden fünf besonders einflussreiche Theorien der kognitiven Entwicklung untersucht: die Theorie von Jean Piaget, der Informationsverarbeitungsansatz, die domänenspezifischen Ansätze und Kernwissenstheorien, die soziokulturelle Perspektive sowie die Perspektive dynamischer Systeme. Wir erläutern hierzu die ihnen zugrunde liegenden theoretischen Annahmen über das Wesen von Kindern, ihre zentralen Fragestellungen und geben praktische Beispiele für ihre pädagogische Anwendbarkeit.
The title of this book—infant memory—appears straightforward. On reflection, however, it becomes apparent that the term memory applies to many different facets of an organism’s ability to conserve and utilize the effects of its experiences. The multiple senses in which memory can be, and has been, used range from what Piaget and Inhelder (1973) labeled “memory in the wide sense,” including acquisition of skills, vocabulary, and adaptive responses, to what they labeled “memory in the strict sense”— the ability to consciously reflect on a specific incident in one’s personal past. Few would deny that it is possible to use the term memory in the foregoing manners. What are the consequences for the study of infant memory?
These experiments tested object permanence in 3-12- and 4-12-month-old infants. The method used in the experiments was similar to that used by Baillargeon, Spelke, and Wasserman (1985). The infants were habituated to a solid screen that rotated back and forth through a 180° arc, in the manner of a drawbridge. Following habituation, a box was placed behind the screen and the infants were shown two test events. In one (possible event), the screen rotated until it reached the occluded box; in the other (impossible event), the screen rotated through a full 180° arc, as though the box were no longer behind it. The 4-12-month-olds, and the 3-12-month-olds who were fast habituators, looked reliably longer at the impossible than at the possible event, suggesting that they understood that (a) the box continued to exist after it was occluded by the screen and (b) the screen could not rotate through the space occupied by the occluded box. Control experiments conducted without the box supported this interpretation. The results of these experiments call into serious question Piaget's (1954) claims about the age at which object permanence emerges and about the processes responsible for its emergence.
A pervasive part of the Piagetian legacy is the belief that fundamental changes in the representation of knowledge occur over the course of development. The most dramatic shift in the representational system is said to take place at the end of infancy (the sensorimotor period). This shift can be understood as a change from merely knowing how to also knowing that. In other words, it is a shift from a procedural to a declarative form of representation (J. Mandler, 1983). As conceived by Piaget, the infant has no representation of the world other than sets of motor and perceptual procedures, that is, mechanisms for acting and for recognizing things. Altogether lacking, in this view, are sets of concepts about the world, gathered together into categories or other abstract formats and accessible to thought independently of familiar recognitory or motor routines.