Report : ' A Lot Of Research '

Laura Schulz’s presentation, The Surprisingly Logical Minds of Babies, explores the idea of how babies and young children are able to learn so much in such a short span of time. In Schulz’s presentation, the viewers see multiple video experiments where she introduces babies to different balls and toys that make noises. I choose to explain and break down the first experiment, that she discusses. In the first experiment Schulz has a colleague reach into a bucket with mostly blue balls and a few yellow balls. The colleague pulls out three of the balls and when she takes each ball out she squeaks them. The colleague then pulls out a yellow ball and hands it to the baby. The child copies what Schulz’s colleague has done, but however the

This was done to make certain that infants’ preferences were established on the social, rather than physical aspects of the characters’ behaviour. The “Inanimate Control” condition involved an inanimate mechanical pincer that performed identical physical actions on the box as the Protagonist with the puppets that were opening and closing the box. Similar to the Social condition, infants were encouraged to reach for one of the puppets to determine whether infants have social reason to prefer one character in comparison to the other. It was demonstrated that inanimate objects do not engage intentional reasoning in infants the way human or stuffed animals do. Thus, infants have no social reason to prefer one character in comparison to the

False belief can best be explained by putting it into a wider context of the ‘Theory of Mind’. Theory of Mind was first proposed in a study observing the behaviour of chimpanzees by Premack and Woodruff (1978). Soon after, Theory of Mind became a well-known concept in the field of psychology. Simon Baron-Cohen (e.g. 1989, 2001) used it to conceptualize autism. He defines ToM, often abbreviated ToM and often referred to as ‘mindreading’ (Whiten, 1991), or ‘mentalizing’ (Frith, Morton, & Leslie, 1991), as being able to understand that other people have beliefs, intentions, emotions, and desires which drive their actions and which are different to the ones we have. When describing ASD children, he then refers to them as

In this experiment children between the ages of six and twenty-four months, are placed in front of a mirror with a red dot on their face. The reason a red dot was placed on their face was to see whether the child could recognize themselves in the mirror. Children that were younger than fifteen months never touched the red dot, but children from the ages of eighteen to twenty-four months did touch the dot on their face (Papalia & Martorell, 2015). The reason these children were able to touch the dot on their face is because they were self-aware. After further experiments, psychologist found that children by the ages of twenty to twenty-four months were able to use self pronouns and children by the age of nineteen to thirty months were able to describe themselves in descriptive terms (Papalia & Martorell, 2015). From the Rogue Test it is shown that self-awareness is formed between fifteen and eighteen months and self-awareness is is shown through the acknowledgment of self-understanding or the knowing an object is your’s or someone else’s (Papalia & Martorell,

When children are given two objects, a familiar and a novel toy, and are asked to pick out a specific toy, using a term they have never heard before (“blicket”) they tend to pick the novel toy. The participants in this study were twenty-four 3- to 4-year-olds. They were split into two groups; one group would use pointing,

Interpretation of these results indicates the vast majority of normal preschool and Down syndrome children could contrast between what they see to be true and what the doll sees to be false. However, the 15% of preschool and 14% of Down syndrome children who failed the belief question need to be taken into account. It may be concluded that at the time of testing, the proportion of preschool children had not yet developed the complete theory of mind, which is a mechanism required to succeed in this study. Also, it can be assumed that the proportion of Down syndrome subjects who failed, simply did not fully understand the question being asked as they have a below average IQ range. Other possible reasons for the two control groups to fail on the belief question may be that they comprehended the question as ambiguous. For example, when asked the belief question, the proportion of the control groups who failed, could have registered

An experiment was performed to examine the age at which infants recognize certain outcomes as impossible. Five-month old infants were tested in the procedure depicted in Figure 1. 3a. According to Figure 1, the first step in the experimental procedure is that two identical objects are to be placed into a case or box, these objects are primarily toys that would capture an infant’s attention. The infant would be roughly 5-months old, and the next step of the experimental would consist that the screen that is hanging from the case or box is to be lifted up and cover the two objects from the 5-month old infants vision. Within the third step the empty hand of the researcher doing the experiment would come in from the same hole that it first came through when it first placed the two objects in the case. The forth step of the experiment would consist of the hand taking one of the two objects from the case which may or may not be seen being removed. In the fourth step an object could also be added, which again can be hidden behind the screen or be completely seen by the 5-month old infant. The fifth step of the experiment in turn would result in two ways, the first being that the case that contained the two objects is now revealed to contain one. Now the second result can end up in which the 5-month old infant is left to wonder and think as two why there may still be two objects when there was clearly a hand that came in to take one object away. 3b. There are two conditions that

Gazing plays a central role in the social and cognitive development of a child. It is documented that from the age of 3 months, a child will begin to develop perceptual learning. An example of this hypothesis was tested with an actor holding a stuffed kitten in front a 1 year old. The 1 year old stared at the kitten longer, therefore the infant’s desire for what the actor was holding caused the infant to interpret the actor’s behavior as

Although the article proved some of the mains points, it does not back up its point from the evidence shown in the Actual paper “Born to Learn: What Infants Learn from Watching Us “ by Dr. Meltzoff. The whole idea behind this article was to confirm the idea that Babies learn from imitating others, which perhaps to parents is a common sense for the reasons that they spend numerous amount of time with their new born babies and until they are socially independent or fully grown. Anyone who is raising kids or perhaps working with kids acknowledges that kids are going to imitate whatever they are going to see. There are many research papers and experiments that provide the evidence that infants learn from watching us. For example one of the experiment’s by Dr.Meltzoff where A 14-month-old where infants were imitating a novel action of touching a panel with the forehead, and then they often react with a smile. The Article ““For Babies, Copy-Cat Games Provide a Social Compass” provides two other experiments run by Dr. Meltzoff to support the evidence but it fails to explain as how a new born who does not even know how he or she looks like, learns to the trick to know that it’s body have matching moving parts to someone’s

In 2014, Yale University's Infant Cognition Center ran a “Baby Lab”. One puppet was shown doing “bad” things; closing a box on another puppet and walking away while, later, another puppet helped the puppet out. Babies were then presented with the bad and good puppets. 80% of the time babies reached or stared at the good puppet. This showed they knew what was right, even at their very young age.

The Cognitive theory is based on internal states, such as motivation, decision-making, thinking, and attention. Children show some signs of “thinking and decision-making” during the study; when the infants were called from the cliff side, they examined the glass by patting it, and even though they feel the solid glass they still didn’t cross to their mothers. They also peered down the glass and backed away. They didn’t simply cross over, they stopped, thought wether this is safe to cross or not, and made the decision to not cross regardless of the hardness of the glass they touched. This is where the developmental theory comes.

Figure 2 contains results from the experiment. The results bear strongly on the experimental hypothesis. 4a. The experimental hypothesis, based on Piaget's theory of object permanence in infants, is that if infants stared and analyzed an object for an extensive amount of time, it could mean they can’t visualize what the outcome may be. However, an alternative hypothesis, inspired by McCrink and Wynn theory, is that infants would be able to determine the outcome through their natural understanding of mathematical operations 4b. An outcome of the current experiment that would support the experimental hypothesis is that infants do not dishabituate and because of their lack of object permanence, as theorized by Piaget, would not even acknowledge

What shocked me the most about how babies think is that they can actually make thoughtful, profound decisions based on very simple stimuli from their environment. (Gopnik, 2011). The difference between the 15-month-old babies and the 18-month-old babies was so distinct, despite both seeming very similar from an outsiders’ perspective. I would have never expected that the 18-month-old babies would determine their course of action on whether to give a “yucky” food or a “yummy” food to the person asking for a piece of food based on that persons’ previous reaction. (Gopnik, 2011) Some children cannot even speak by that age, so it seems pretty amazing that

According to Leslie’s metarepresentational model, during pretence children are capable of distinguishing between two representations of two simultaneous situations. The first representation is for “how the situation is actually perceived, whereas the other represents what the pretense is” (Leslie, 1987). In order to hold these two differing mental representations, the pretender engages in decoupling. Decoupling occurs when a representations is removed from the real world and placed onto a pretense context. For example, decoupling allows children to say, “This banana is a telephone.” while not perceiving it literally (Leslie,

In our everyday lives, the origin of our ability to communicate is usually not often taken into consideration. One doesn't think about how every person has, or rather had at one time, an innate ability to learn a language to total fluency without a conscious effort – a feat that is seen by the scientific community "as one of the many utterly unexplainable mysteries that beset us in our daily lives" (3).. Other such mysteries include our body's ability to pump blood and take in oxygen constantly seemingly without thought, and a new mother's ability to unconsciously raise her body temperature when her infant is placed on her chest. But a child's first language acquisition is different from these