A friend of mine mentioned that years ago, there was a NOVA episode in which they did an experiment to test theories about how babies learned certain things. In one experiment, they had some infants (2-3months old), and gave them special pacifiers that could monitor how hard/fast the baby sucked. Whenever the baby got agitated/suprised/upset in any way, the baby would suck harder/faster. Okay, now what one of the experiments was like this: they had a cup slowly pushed to the edge of the table until it fell and hit the ground. Some babies were startled by the noise, but other than that, no big upset. Then, they placed a clear glass sheet next to the table. They pushed the cup to the edge, and over, but it didn’t fall. This upset many of the babies. Some of the people claimed infants are born with some prior knowledge of how things work. I was unable to find this particular episode. Does anyone know which it is, or know of any other resources pertaining to the prior knowledge type of discussion?
I haven’t seen this Nova episode, but I happened recently to hear something on NPR about a similar experiment.
The researchers in this instance, however, viewed the increased sucking as an indication that the infant was concentrating/learning. An experiment was described in which a book was read to the child. After repeated exposure, the book became familiar and the sucking intensity/frequency decreased. But when the same book was read in a different language, the sucking became more intense. The supposition was that the child was now concentrating on absorbing the new information.
Assuming that, in the experiment your friend described, the same infants were used for both parts, did they actually “know” what was supposed to happen, or were they merely taking notice of the different results?
I saw a similar experiment on TV once, and the babies had seen things fall off of the table once, then again with the clear glass. I think the conclusion was that the babies might have remembered what happened before.
No surprise to me, as I don’t think that babies are idiots. They spend most of their time exploring their environment, and conducting experiments (Hmmm… what happens when I push this toy over…). They generally have a fairly firm grasp on gravity and basic physics by the time they’re walking.
I would wonder about the design of the experiment. Were adults in the room when the experiment took place? The babies could have been cueing off their expectations.
Actually, it turns out that babies ARE stupid, as the following link explains
http://www.theonion.com/onion3119/stupidbabies.html
Arjuna34
there’s a whole lot of things babies react to with more sucking (btw, robinh has hit the nose in the nostril with the sucking reason). Like simple math. Show a baby three apples being placed into a basket, but have four come out. Or a peekaboo, but with a different object reappearing. manny manny more examples, but none off the top of my head.
Steve Pinker discusses a lot of this in his books, and a priori knowledge is a fundamental of Chomskian theory.
I’m not familiar with some of these experiments, but this “high amplitude sucking technique” is usually used to indicate when babies can distinguish between different stimuli. E.g. Baby is exposed to a stimulus for a little while, sucking starts out rapidly and then as Baby’s interest wanes sucking decreases. Then a different stimulus is shown and if the baby can distinguish it from the previous one, the baby will become interested in the novel stimulus and sucking speed will increase again. In this way the novelty of stimuli can be assessed. (There are other methods of doing this as well.)