Using the Habituation Technique to Evaluate a Piagetian Hypothesis (Fun Paper #3) PDF

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1 Hernandez Yacinda Hernandez Psychology in the Modern World Prof. Bob Melara 29 October 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-month olds in a task that involves possible and impossible outcomes. Piaget's theory specifies the cognitive competencies of children of this age. 1.a Children, from birth to nearly age two, are in the sensorimotor stage. Infants experience the world through senses and actions. 1.b Infants younger than six months seem to be only aware of what is currently present due to their lack of object permeance- the awareness that objects continue to exist when no longer perceived. According to Piaget's theory of cognitive development, the absence of object permeance is due to a baby's egocentric nature and inability to comprehend a world viewed in another perspective. Piaget further explains the absence of object permanence in young infants through an experiment in which he showed an infant a toy and then hid it. Infants younger than six months would act as if the toy never even existed. Piaget believed that object permeance emerges when the child, typically around eight months, begins to develop schemas because of an improvement in infant memory. They will assimilate new experiences, and as they interact with the world, they will begin to accommodate their schemas and incorporate information provided by new experiences. 1.c Children in this stage also start to develop stranger anxiety. This ability allows for children eight months and older to evaluate people and unfamiliar and threatening. A reasonable

2 Hernandez explanation that object permeance and stranger anxiety occur around the same time is in part to the child's developing schema. The infant is already accustomed to familiar objects and people; therefore, unrecognizable people can cause confusion and fear 1.d Modern researches believe Piaget and his followers underestimated young children's competence. McCrink and Wynn's theory of cognitive competency that is differs from Piaget's. Their theory states that infants could make simple math computations. They showed 5-month-olds one or two objects and then hidden the objects behind a screen. When Wynn lifted the screen, the infants often stared longer when shown a wrong number of purposes. However, they were just responding to the mass of objects rather than a change in quantity. Their view opposes Piaget's theory by providing evidence that a sense of object permeance may occur earlier than Piaget observed. Habituation is a method that might be used to explore predictions of Piaget's theory. 2.a Researchers exploit habituation, the decrease in response to repeated stimulation, to study an infant's ability to learn and remember. Habituation allows researchers to determine if infants can discriminate between stimuli and notice notable changes between events. Dishabituation, the answer to an old stimulus as if it is new, can often reappear after repeated exposure to a stimuli evoked habitation. The relationship between habituation and dishabituation can affect researchers' testing involving the cognitive capacity of infants. 2.b Conditioning is an alternative technique that can be used to test the cognitive capacity during infancy. During this process, an infant is given a specific task (e.g., interacting with a toy) and is then rewarded with sensory stimuli (e.g., parent's voice) if the infant begins to complete the task at a faster rate. The infant will learn the correlation and will start to perform at a more rapid rate until they began to become bored. The researcher will then introduce a new sound. If able to discriminate the unique sound it will complete the task at a faster rate. 2.c The simplicity of the habituation technique gives it an

3 Hernandez advantage over the conditional method. The conditioning experiment requires the infant to conduct an additional task which may distract them from the stimuli, this room for error is not present in the habituation technique. 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. 3.a

Figure 1 The procedure of the above experiment is as follows. First, a certain number of objects are visibly placed in a case. Then, a screen rises obscuring the objects. Next, an empty hand enters and removes one of the objects. Finally, either a possible outcome, the screen drops revealing one less object, or an impossible outcome, the screen drops revealing the same amount or more objects, occurs. The more time in which the infants stare at the different results is then measured. 3.b The experiment consists of two different conditions- the possible and impossible outcome. The condition that would most likely be considered experimental is the impossible outcome given that infants exposed to the impossible outcome display a sense of mathematical operation for the possible outcome rather than impossible. Different infants will be required to be tested in each condition to measure variability. Infants unable to recognize at least one difference will be excluded from the experiment. The control group is necessary to distinguish how an infant can

4 Hernandez perceive the possible and impossible outcomes. The control group is needed to compare the experimental condition with the standard. The possible outcome will be for the control group. 3.c The habituation technique is used in this experiment because it is testing how the infants are reacting to the two dolls. After they are habituated with seeing two toys behind the screen, so when a changed was made, they stared longer due to inters and confused. The independent variable is the two conditions, and the dependent variable is the amount of time measured. Figure 2 contains results from the experiment. The results bear strongly on the experimental hypothesis. 4.a Using Piaget's theory, the experimental hypothesis is if the infants gaze at the toys for long, they are not habituated with the outcome. Piaget further underestimated the capabilities of infants and could not have been able to comprehend a value should be more or Figure 2 less. Furthermore, he believed children lacked object permeance; infants would not be able to know whether an object was removed or if a screen was dropped. The alternate hypothesis according to McCrink, is that infants are able to perform simple numeric computations overrepresentation of large numbers. They will use an object tracking system, but only up to the number, and a magnitude representation system that would determine an outcome of a more significant number from addition or subtraction. The infant's response to the unexpected objects, like in the impossible condition, will be more apparent. They would stare longer at the impossible outcome because they would know that the subtraction of one object from two would equal one not two. 4.b A result of the current experiment that would support that experimental hypothesis is that infants are not habituated of either outcome which supports Piaget's theory of object permeance. If the infants stare for the same amount of both outcomes, it displays the lack of object permeance since they were unable to differentiate each outcome. If the infants were dishabituated towards the incorrect results only, it would support McCrink and Wynn's argument

5 Hernandez because it shows that the infants were able to track the items and determine the correct outcome. The infants instead will stare longer at the impossible outcome demonstrating that the infants have an early mathematical competency and dishabituate. 4.c The result of this experiment is that the infants stared longer at the impossible situation, displaying a

computation. They were able to track the objects behind the

Staring time (se c)

sense in basic number

20

screen and determine the correct

15 10 5 0 Possible

Impossible

results of the mathematical operation. The impossible condition showed a greater dishabituation than the possible condition of 100%. To determine whether the difference carries statistical significance the information from the variation of the starting time of each group. 4.d The results of the experiment are consistent with the alternative hypothesis. McCrink and Wynn's disproved Piaget's hypothesis because infants were found to practice habituation and had some understanding of object permeance. The results proved that infants did, in fact, stare longer at the impossible outcome longer that the possible outcome approximately twice as long. 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. 5.a The new results display that

Figure 3

infants forgot what they saw and could not memorize what was

Staring time (se c)

20 15 10 5 0 Possible

Impossible

6 Hernandez displayed. These results do not correlate with the conclusion made in 4.d. However, both results from Figure 2 and Figure 3 could be correct if the same infants were used in both trials. If all the infants had short attention spans, due to undeveloped parts of the brain lobes, the one-second delay is short enough to allow them to remember a hand removing one of the dolls from the case, but not remember the doll's removal after a ten-second time span. 5.b These results align with Piaget's hypothesis because they do not exhibit habituation. Instead, the results illustrate that due to the increased time between the object being removed and the screen dropping the infants were more likely to forget the object or number of objects, thus pertaining to object permanence. Nevertheless, his theory cannot explain the results in Figure 2 because they do not show the possible outcome for his hypothesis, which states that object permeance has precedent over infants' thoughts over number sense. 5.c McCrink and Wynn's follow-up experiment consisted of testing infants on larger addition/subtraction. In the follow-up, McCrink and Wynn experiment instead was based on the mass of the objects. They manipulated the objects by controlling the density, making the objects wider or thinner on a computer, which demonstrated how the infants would respond to the change. This manipulation of computer rendered objects made sure the infants were not able to memorize the objects. They concluded that infants have a simple object tracking system that assists in the tracking of objects and compares them to what they see, rather than using mathematical skills to add and subtract. After realizing infants can only use this for small numbers they performed a follow-up using larger values. The object tracking system performed in a similar way to the memory mismatch mentioned by the critic....