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After reading this passage what are your thoughts on it ? …
After reading this passage what are your thoughts on it ?
“Evaluating Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
Piaget opened up a new way of looking at infants with his view that their main task is to coordinate their sensory impressions with their motor activity. However, the infant’s cognitive world is not as neatly packaged as Piaget portrayed it, and some of Piaget’s explanations for the cause of cognitive changes in development are debated. In the past several decades, sophisticated experimental techniques have been devised to study infants, and there have been a large number of research studies on infant development. Much of the new research suggests that Piaget’s view of sensorimotor development needs to be modified (Anderson, Hespos, & Rips, 2018; Krist & others, 2018; Meltzoff & Marshall, 2018).
The A-not-B Error
One modification concerns Piaget’s claim that certain processes are crucial in transitions from one stage to the next. The data do not always support his explanations. For example, in Piaget’s theory, an important feature in the progression into substage 4, coordination of secondary circular reactions, is an infant’s inclination to search for a hidden object in a familiar location rather than to look for the object in a new location. For example, if a toy is hidden twice, initially at location A and subsequently at location B, 8- to 12-month-old infants search correctly at location A initially. But when the toy is subsequently hidden at location B, they make the mistake of continuing to search for it at location A. A-not-B error (also called error) is the term used to describe this common mistake. Older infants are less likely to make the A-not-B error because their concept of object permanence is more complete.
Researchers have found, however, that a variety of parameters affect whether infants make A-not-B errors. For example, when only the hands and arms rather than the full body of an experimenter are visible, 9-month-old infants are less likely to make A-not-B errors, suggesting that part of the error is due to infants’ imitation of body movements (Boyer, Harding, & Bertenthal, 2017). Likewise, A-not-B errors are sensitive to the delay between hiding the object at B and the infant’s attempt to find it (Buss, Ross-Sheehy, & Reynolds, 2018). Thus, the A-not-B error might be due to a failure in memory. Another explanation is that infants tend to repeat a previous motor behavior (MacNeill & others, 2018).
Perceptual Development and Expectations
One of the major strengths of Piaget’s theory is that it formed a set of hypotheses for the developmental course of cognition and perception that could be tested in future research. Since Piaget’s time, infants’ perceptual abilities and cognition have been found to be more advanced at earlier ages than theorized by Piaget (Barrouillet, 2015).Page 165
Research also suggests that infants develop the ability to understand how the world works at a very early age (Baillargeon & DeJong, 2017). In experiments designed to test infants’ expectations of how physical objects and people will behave, infants are often placed before a puppet stage and shown a series of actions that would either be expected or unexpected depending on one’s understanding of how the world works. How long infants look at each series of actions is used as a measure of surprise, because babies look longer at surprising than at expected events. Infants look longer in experiments that violate their expectations about the physical or social world than in experiments in which objects and people behave as infants expect them to. For example, by as early as 5 months of age, infants understand differences between how solid substances and liquid substances will behave and even have expectations about how potentially trickier granular substances, such as sand, will behave (Hespos & others, 2016). Likewise, from early in life, infants have expectations about how other people will behave. In a study in which infants were shown videos of a stranger either comforting or ignoring a crying infant, even 4-month-old infants were more surprised by the video in which the stranger ignored rather than comforted the infant (Jin & others, 2018).
One criticism of studies that use how long infants look at different types of events as a measure of their understanding of how the world works is that looking time might be a better measure of perceptual expectations than knowledge. Thus, researchers advocate using different types of methodologies to study infant cognition rather than relying on any single approach. New neuroimaging techniques and measures of psychophysiology offer options for assessing infants’ cognitive development (Ellis & Turk-Browne, 2018). For example, infants’ visual attention is related to changes in heart rate (Reynolds & Richards, 2017).
Within the first year of life, infants have learned how objects behave in relation to other objects and in relation to laws of the physical world, such as gravity. Infants also have learned that people generally behave in goal-directed ways toward objects (Corbetta & Fagard, 2017). As infants develop, their experiences and actions on objects help them to understand physical laws, and their experiences with people help them to understand the social world (Ullman & others, 2018).Page 166
Nature and Nurture
Both nature and nurture play important roles in infant development. The core knowledge approach states that infants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge systems. Among these domain-specific knowledge systems are those involving space, number sense, object permanence, and language (which we will discuss later in this chapter). Strongly influenced by evolution, the core knowledge domains are theorized to be prewired to allow infants to make sense of their world. After all, how could infants possibly grasp the complex world in which they live if they didn’t come into the world equipped with core sets of knowledge? In this approach, the innate core knowledge domains form a foundation on which more mature cognitive functioning and learning develop. Proponents of the core knowledge approach argue that Piaget greatly underestimated the cognitive abilities of infants, especially young infants (Jin & Baillargeon, 2017).
An intriguing domain of core knowledge that has been investigated in young infants is whether they have a sense of number. Using the violations of expectations method discussed in the Connecting Through Research interlude, Karen Wynn (1992) conducted an early experiment on infants’ sense of number. Five-month-old infants were shown one or two Mickey Mouse dolls on a puppet stage. Then the experimenter hid the doll(s) behind a screen and visibly removed or added one. Next, when the screen was lifted, the infants looked longer when they saw the incorrect number of dolls. Other researchers also have found that infants can distinguish between different numbers of objects, actions, and sounds (Odic, 2018; Smith & others, 2017).
Not everyone agrees that young infants have early math skills. One criticism is that infants in the number experiments are merely responding to changes in the display that violated their expectations.
In criticizing the core knowledge approach, British developmental psychologist Mark Johnston (2008) says that infants already have accumulated hundreds, and in some cases even thousands, of hours of experience in grasping what the world is about, which gives considerable room for the environment’s role in the development of infant cognition. According to Johnston (2008), infants likely come into the world with “soft biases to perceive and attend to different aspects of the environment, and to learn about the world in particular ways.” Although debate about the cause and course of infant cognitive development continues, most developmentalists today agree that Piaget underestimated the early cognitive accomplishments of infants and that both nature and nurture are involved in infants’ cognitive development (Baillargeon, 2014).
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“Conclusions
In sum, many researchers conclude that Piaget wasn’t specific enough about how infants learn about their world and that infants, especially young infants, are more competent than Piaget thought. As researchers have examined the specific ways that infants learn, the field of infant cognition has become very specialized. Many researchers are at work on different questions, with no general theory emerging that can connect all of the different findings. Their theories often are local theories, focused on specific research questions, rather than grand theories like Piaget’s. If there is a unifying theme, it is that investigators in infant development seek to understand more precisely how developmental changes in cognition take place. As they seek to identify more precisely the contributions of nature and nurture to infant development, researchers face the difficult task of determining whether the course of acquiring information, which is very rapid in some domains, is better accounted for by an innate set of biases (that is, core knowledge) or by the extensive input of environmental experiences to which the infant is exposed (Aslin, 2012). Recall that exploring connections between brain, cognition, and development involves the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience (Steinbeis & others, 2017).”
