Fun Paper 2 Gabriel Adalla PDF

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Gabriel Adalla Psychology 102 10/29/2018 Using the Habituation Technique to Evaluate a Piagetian Hypothesis The purpose of this paper is to use the habituation technique in young infants to evaluate one hypothesis derived from Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. I will compare 5-months olds in a task that involves possible and impossible outcomes. Piaget’s theory specifies the cognitive competencies of children of this age. 1a. From birth to nearly age 2, babies go through the sensorimotor stage. This is a stage in Piaget’s theory, in which infants experience the world through their senses and actions. Through looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, and grasping. They learn to make things happen, as their hands and limbs begin to move. 1b. Babies in this stage also lack object permanence, which is the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived. According to Piaget, babies are egocentric and have no grasp of the world separate from their own. They also lack schemas, therefore, they do not have mental representations of the objects around them. Their object permanence emerges around their 8-month-old mark, according to Piaget’s studies. By 8 months, infants begin exhibiting memory for things no longer seen and will look for objects that were momentarily hidden. 1c. Around the same time, an infant's object permanence emerges, at 8 months old, stranger anxiety also surfaces. Children this age have schemas for familiar faces; they become distressed when they can not comprehend new faces into their remembered schemas. 1d. Contrasting Piaget’s theory of cognitive competency, psychologists McCrink and Wynn believed that children had a sense of numbers. Infants are capable of basic addition and subtraction. Unlike Piaget who underestimated

young children's competence, and believed they did not have the ability to perform basic math.

Habituation is a method that might be used to explore predictions of Piaget’s theory. 2a. Habituation is a decrease in responding with repeated stimulation. Dishabituation, on the other hand, is the response to the old stimulus as if it were new again. Habituation technique is a technique in which the novel stimulus gets attention and through repetition, the stimulus-response weakens. This boredom with familiar stimuli provides us with insight into what infants see and remember. 2b. An alternative technique that can be used to test the cognitive capacity of infants is sight and sound. Newborns facilitate social responsiveness with speech and gaze their heads towards a human direction. This can be used to study how infants are cognitively reactive to the world around them. 2c. However, unlike my alternative study, habituation technique is more advantageous in the sense that habituation tests a wider variety of stimuli, that allows for a stronger cognitive capacity test.

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. The first step shows that two objects are placed in a case. Then the screen pulls up to cover the objects, in the second step. The 3rd and 4th step shows an empty hand taking one of the objects from the case. For the 5th step, the screen comes down and reveals one of two things: a possible outcome where one object is revealed or an impossible outcome where both objects remain and are still in the case. 3b. This experiment exhibits two different conditions. The condition that is most appropriately called the experimental condition would be the impossible outcome, primarily because it is the condition that would have a longer reaction time for the infants. The same infants would be tested in each condition because the gist of this experiment is to know if infants can comprehend an impossible outcome. Having subjects exposed to both possible and impossible outcomes allows for comparison on how long the child spent staring at both outcomes. A possible control group that can be used in this experiment is having infants with a stronger object permanence. 3c. Habituation technique is utilized in this experiment by having the same object revealed to the infants, repeatedly. The independent variable in this experiment is the possible and impossible outcome, and the dependent variable is the timeframe the infant spends staring at the outcomes.

Figure 2 contains results from the experiment. The results bear strongly on the experimental hypothesis.4a. According to his studies, Piaget would have hypothesized that an infant would not react to the impossible outcome, because of their lack of object permanence. Alternatively, McCrink and Wynn would hypothesize that young infants will react to the impossible outcome and stare longer because they are capable of sensing numbers. 4b. An outcome of the current experiment that would support the Piaget’s hypothesis is if the infants stare at both outcomes at the same amount of time. However, if the infants stare at the impossible outcome longer than the possible outcome, it would support McCrink and Wynn’s alternative theory.

4c. According to figure 2 infants stare longer at the impossible outcome than the possible outcome. The condition that showed the greatest dishabituation is the impossible outcome. The time spent looking at the possible outcome was 50% less than the time spent looking at the impossible outcome. However, in order to determine whether the difference between conditions was statistically significant, I would need more variation within the groups. 4d. The results of this experiment were more congruent with McCrink & Wynn’s alternative hypothesis. The infants spent a long time staring at the impossible outcome rather than the possible outcome. This shows that

infants have a sense of numbers and math, which aligns with McCrink & Wynn’s theory. The results of the experiment were valuable in addressing the hypothesis under study. However, future investigations may need to adopt techniques that improve upon those used here.

5a. If there is an increase in the time interval for steps 4 and 5 from 1 second to 10 seconds the results would not match the conclusion made in question 4d. This is because infants are not skilled enough to withstand information for a long period of time. Both results in figure 2 and figure 3 could be true because infants can retain information at a short time frame, however, if it is a long time (10 seconds) they may forget information, therefore, having the same reaction time to both outcomes. 5b. The results in figure 3 fit the Piagetian hypothesis because Piaget believed that infants lack object permanence, therefore, the reaction time for both outcomes were similar. However in. this situation the timeframe between steps 4 and 5 were just increased to 10 seconds. Piaget’s theory can also explain figure 2 if the infants were able to remember the objects behind the case. 5c. A follow-up experiment by McCrink & Wynn infants were shown objects that had different sizes, while they were shown a variety of movies. The objects constantly fluctuated in size until covered by an occluder. When the occluder was raised all shapes were similar in size. The infants were shown both outcomes. This

would rebuttal a possible critics argument because this experiment shows that it's not a change from the increase time frame, rather than how the objects were perceived....