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Infants' Understanding of Physical Phenomena : a Perceptual Hypothesis

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Infants' Understanding of Physical Phenomena : a Perceptual Hypothesis University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-1997 Infants' understanding of physical phenomena : a perceptual hypothesis. Thomas Harold Schilling University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation Schilling, Thomas Harold, "Infants' understanding of physical phenomena : a perceptual hypothesis." (1997). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 3272. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/3272 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. UMA8S { 3150bb ono 3 FIVE COLLEGE DEPOSITORY :i? i ,T : - ’ ’ r ' / ' ; !vi; , ' ' - ‘ • - XM 4 , v" - ' - - ;:- a -\ ' . > \-; . v 'r* : M ?, '• ‘"“‘ r 1 • v - v v- v , ; : zb . S • " r - ' •' *! INFANTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF PHYSICAL PHENOMENA: A PERCEPTUAL HYPOTHESIS A Dissertation Presented by THOMAS HAROLD SCHILLING Submitted to the Graduate School of the fulfillment University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 1997 Psychology Department Copyright by Thomas Harold Schilling 1997 All Rights Reserved INFANTS' UNDERSTANDING OF PHYSICAL PHENOMENA: A PERCEPTUAL HYPOTHESIS A Dissertation Presented by Thomas H. Schilling Approved as to style and content by: A^ cgr/-£^ Rachel K. Clifton, Chair S Melinda Novak, Department Head Psychology Department DEDICATION To Richard DeCesare who introduced me to the enduring epistemological questions of western philosophy and Beverly Roder who introduced me to the scientific methods that have allowed me to inquire and attempt to develop my own answers. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee members Rachel Clifton, Richard Bogartz, Emily Bushnell, Katherine Fite, and Kevin Nugent for their thorough reading and insightful comments on this dissertation. I would also like to thank all of the parents who brought their infants to the Infant Studies Lab at Tufts University. Without their generous support this project would have been impossible. Special thanks goes to Emily Bushnell who allowed me full access to her lab and served as a special adviser during my year at Tufts. The credit for the design and development of an apparatus that could be controlled via a computer goes completely to David Schilling. His engineering work has set a high standard for the development of equipment and software for future studies. My deepest thanks and appreciation goes to my research assistants Robert Harris, Melissa Schilling, Margaret Temesvari, and Odessa Grabowski who helped to collect and painstakingly score the data. Their care and concern for this project went well beyond the call of few duty and their efforts served to inspire and uplift me more than a thank my wife times during low points in this project. I would like to from the beginning Hildy who provided constant support and encouragement daughters Cindy and Haley for to the end of this project. Thanks to my development. Finally, I bringing renewed meaning and interest in infant wonderful advisor for six would like to thank Rachel Clifton for being a researcher and her tact, respect, and years. Her remarkable career as a model and lofty goal for my own humanity as a mentor will serve as a career v ABSTRACT INFANTS' UNDERSTANDING OF PHYSICAL PHENOMENA: A PERCEPTUAL HYPOTHESIS SEPTEMBER, 1997 THOMAS HAROLD SCHILLING, B.S., FITCHBURG STATE COLLEGE A.L.M., HARVARD UNIVERSITY Ph . D . , UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Rachel K. Clifton Piaget (1953) believed object permanence emerges through a series of stages at approximately 18-months. Contemporary researchers have suggested infants achieve object permanence by 3.5-months . A series of studies by Baillargeon (1987) utilized a violation-of-expectation paradigm habituating infants to a paddle moving 180°. During test trials, a block was positioned in the path of the paddle. During "possible" trials, the paddle moved 120°, stopped at the block and returned. During the "impossible" trials, the paddle moved 180°, seemingly through the block. Infants looked longer at the impossible the events suggesting an understanding that one object cannot occupy could not be space of another object contiguously. Looking times impossible event explained by detecting perceptual novelty because the was the more familiar of the test events. infants look longer Hunter and Ames (1988) have demonstrated that thoroughly encoded habituation at familiar stimuli if they have not that habituation is a function of stimuli. These researchers believed The current research examines the time, age, and task difficulty. impossible events because these possibility that infants look longer at To test whether infants had events are perceptually familiar. VI . sufficient opportunity to encode habituation events using the moving paddle paradigm, the number of habituation trials and infants' age were manipulated Four-month-olds who received 7-180° habituation trials looked longer at the 180° test event (a significant familiarity preference) Four-month-olds receiving 7-112° habituation trials looked longer at the 112° test event (a significant familiarity preference) . Four-month-olds receiving 12-180° habituation events looked significantly longer at the 112° test event (a significant novelty preference) . A group of 6-month- olds habituated to 7-180° trials showed no preferential looking during the test trials. For the four-month-olds, looking times during the test trials were a function of the type of familiarity event and whether there were enough trials to fully encode the habituation events. Looking time was not necessarily a function of an inferred violation of physics. Performance on the moving paddle paradigm might be more easily explained by perceptual mechanisms. VII . TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v ABSTRACT vi LIST OF TABLES x LIST OF FIGURES xi Chapter I INTRODUCTION 1 II. THE PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS OF PERCEPTION AND KNOWLEDGE 3 A. The Rationalists 4 B. The Empiricists 6 6 1. The Empiricism of Locke 7 a. Simple and Complex Ideas b. Primary and Secondary Qualities 8 9 c. Substances 2. Berkeley's Extension of Locke H 13 a. Sources of Sense Data I-3 3. The Radical Skepticism of Hume 16 4. Kant's Reply to Hume 16 a. Kant's Theory of Knowledge PERCEPTION 2 ^* Ill SCIENTIFIC THEORIES OF . 9 n of Perception A. The Helmholtz View Perception ^ B. Marr's Theory of 9 o OBJECT PERMANENCE IV. PIAGET'S THEORY OF PERCEPTION 32 V. GIBSON'S THEORY OF 38 CONTEMPORARY VIEWS OF OBJECT PERMANENCE VI . 38 Studies o£ Object Permanence A Baillargeon ' s Interpretations of B Theoretical 41 * * * • * ' s Data Baillargeon ; Baillargeon 1 s View of c Criticisms of d4 Object Permanence viii 1. Neurological Underpinnings of Habituation 45 2. Developing Expectations in the Lab 50 D. The Familiarity Hypothesis 55 E. Application of the Familiarity Hypothesis to the Moving Paddle Studies 60 VII. EXPERIMENTAL MANIPULATION OF HABITUATION EVENTS AND AGE 63 A. Introduction 63 B. Method 65 1. Participants 65 2. Stimuli and Apparatus 66 3. Procedure-Overview 68 4. Procedure 69 5. Scoring 70 C. Results and Discussion 72 1. Habituation Data 76 2. Dishabituation Data 79 3. Test Event Discrimination Data 83 VIII. OVERALL DISCUSSION 92 A The Importance of Familiarity Effects? 92 QQ B. Final Comments BIBLIOGRAPHY 102 IX , , LIST OF TABLES Table2.1 Page Kant's Pure Concepts of Understanding 17 7.1 Number of infants who reached Baillargeon ' s (1987) 4 habituation criterion in Group A (7-180°, -month-olds ) 4 (12-180°, -month-olds ) , C (7-112° B , 4-month-olds), and D (7-180°, 6-month-olds) (n = 20 in all groups) 77 7.2 Accumulated habituation times for Group: A (7-180°, 4-month-olds), B (12-180°, 4-month-olds), C (7-112° 4-month-olds) , and D (7-180°, 6-month-olds) (n = 20 in all groups) 78 7.3 Decline in looking (in seconds) during habituation as measured by difference in average of first three and last three habituation trials for Group: A (7-180°, 4-month-olds) B (12-180°, 4-month-olds), C (7-112° 4-month-olds), and D (7-180°, 6-month-olds) (n = 20 in all groups) 79 7.4 Comparison of the average of the last two habituation trials with 180° and 112° test events in seconds for Groups A-D 8:1 7.5 Familiarity and novelty preferences during test trials for Groups A-D X LIST OF FIGURES Figure p age 6.1 Schematic drawing of the event shown to the infants in Baillargeon et al. (1985) and Baillargeon (1987) 39 7.1 Four-month-old infants' looking time (in seconds) during 7 180° habituation and 4 test trials 73 7.2 Four-month-old infants' looking time (in seconds) during 12 180° habituation and 4 test trials 74 7.3 Four-month-old infants' looking time (in seconds) during 7 112° habituation and 4 test trials 75 7.4 Six-month-old infants' looking time (in seconds) during 7 180° habituation and 4 test trials 7 5 7.5 Interaction of Test Pair x Trial Type x Order for Group A 84 7.6 Interaction of Test Pair x Trial Type for Group XI CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION An important issue in developmental psychology is how and when cognitive abilities emerge. Two contrasting theories have been developed to address this issue. One view championed by Spelke (e.g., Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992) maintains that perception and understanding of the world is partly innate. According to this view, the brain has evolved to such a point that perceptual constraints are already built into the brain and that an understanding of physical phenomena is simply an emergent quality of the brain. An alternative view is that the infant develops an understanding environment of physical phenomena by actively interacting with its 1996).
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