Website: View Project Website
Grantee: University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA
Project Lead: Richard N. Aslin, Ph.D.and Jacques Mehler
Grant Title: Task force on infant looking methods used to assess cognitive development.
Program Area: Bridging Brain, Mind & Behavior
Grant Type: Collaborative Activity Award
Year Awarded: 2001
Project Summary:
Developmental scientists have known for decades that infants are able to control their eye movements, long before they can control motor movements, like reaching. Thus, developmental scientists exploit experimental methods that rely on infants’ ability to control their gaze to assess what infants notice, perceive, and in some cases, what they know. For instance, if an infant is repeatedly shown a face, he/she will look longer when a novel face appears in the series than at the familiar face. From this the scientist infers that the infant notices the new face and can distinguish it from the familiar face. This use of duration and selectivity of infant gaze is relatively uncontroversial.
However, there are other uses of this experimental method that are more controversial. In some laboratories, infants are shown what the scientists call an “impossible event”. For example, one solid object might appear to move through another, or one object might appear to become two objects. In some of these experiments, children appear to look at the “impossible event” longer than at a possible event. Some developmental psychologists give high-level explanations to these behaviors, claiming that longer looking times at impossible events indicate that infants have knowledge of how the physical world works, even in the absence of experience with physical objects. This shows, they argue, that infants are born as intuitive physicists, biologists, and psychologists. Other scientists however, in the spirit of Povinelli, tend to give these looking time experiments simpler, low-level explanations in terms of reflex, sensory overload, or saturation of neural circuits and deny that infants have innate theories of how the world works. Yet a third group of scientists have been unable to replicate these results. This has engendered heated controversies within developmental psychology.
A necessary first step in settling these controversies is to assure that scientists use standardized methods in looking time experiments. Only when the methods are standardized can there be consistent interpretations of the observed behaviors. This project will take this first step.