TY - JOUR
T1 - The development of calibration-based reasoning about collision events in young infants
AU - Kotovsky, Laura
AU - Baillargeon, Renée
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-21104) to the second author. We thank Jerry DeJong, Judy DeLoache, Cindy Fisher, Gavin Huntley-Fenner, Lisa Kaufman, and Greg Murphy for helpful comments; Alison Hauser and Anne Hillstrom for their help with the data analyses; and Andrea Aguiar, Laura Brueckner, Beth Cullum, Myra Gillespie, Lisa Kaufman, Valerie Kolstad, Amy Needham, Helen Raschke, Teresa Wilcox, and the undergraduate students working in the Infant Cognition Laboratory at the University of Illinois for their help with the data collection. We also thank the parents who kindly agreed to have their infants participate in the experiments.
Copyright:
Copyright 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 1998/7/15
Y1 - 1998/7/15
N2 - Previous research indicates that, when shown a collision between a moving and a stationary object, 11-month-old infants believe that the size of the moving object affects how far the stationary object is displaced. The present experiments examined whether 6.5- and 5.5-month-old infants hold the same belief. The infants sat in front of a horizontal track; to the left of the track was an inclined ramp. A wheeled toy bug rested on the track at the bottom of the ramp. The infants were habituated to an event in which a medium-size cylinder rolled down the ramp and hit the bug, propelling it to the middle of the track. Next, the infants saw two test events in which novel cylinders propelled the bug to the end of the track. The two novel cylinders were identical to the habituation cylinder in material but not in size: one was larger (large-cylinder event) and one was smaller (small-cylinder event) than the habituation cylinder. The 6.5-month-old infants, and the 5.5-month-old female infants, looked reliably longer at the small- than at the large-cylinder event. These and control results indicated that the infants (a) believed that the size of the cylinder affected the length of the bug's trajectory and (b) used the habituation event to calibrate their predictions about the test events. Unlike the other infants, the 5.5-month-old male infants tended to look equally at the small- and large-cylinder events. Further results indicated that this negative finding was not due to the infants' (a) failure to remember how far the bug rolled in the habituation event or (b) inability to use the habituation event to calibrate predictions about novel test events. Together, the present results suggest the following conclusions. First, when shown a collision between a moving and a stationary object, infants aged 5.5-6.5 months (a) believe that there is a proportional relation between the size of the moving object and the distance traveled by the stationary object and (b) can engage in calibration-based reasoning about this size/distance relation. Second, female infants precede males by a few weeks in this development, for reasons that may be related to sex differences in the maturation of depth perception.
AB - Previous research indicates that, when shown a collision between a moving and a stationary object, 11-month-old infants believe that the size of the moving object affects how far the stationary object is displaced. The present experiments examined whether 6.5- and 5.5-month-old infants hold the same belief. The infants sat in front of a horizontal track; to the left of the track was an inclined ramp. A wheeled toy bug rested on the track at the bottom of the ramp. The infants were habituated to an event in which a medium-size cylinder rolled down the ramp and hit the bug, propelling it to the middle of the track. Next, the infants saw two test events in which novel cylinders propelled the bug to the end of the track. The two novel cylinders were identical to the habituation cylinder in material but not in size: one was larger (large-cylinder event) and one was smaller (small-cylinder event) than the habituation cylinder. The 6.5-month-old infants, and the 5.5-month-old female infants, looked reliably longer at the small- than at the large-cylinder event. These and control results indicated that the infants (a) believed that the size of the cylinder affected the length of the bug's trajectory and (b) used the habituation event to calibrate their predictions about the test events. Unlike the other infants, the 5.5-month-old male infants tended to look equally at the small- and large-cylinder events. Further results indicated that this negative finding was not due to the infants' (a) failure to remember how far the bug rolled in the habituation event or (b) inability to use the habituation event to calibrate predictions about novel test events. Together, the present results suggest the following conclusions. First, when shown a collision between a moving and a stationary object, infants aged 5.5-6.5 months (a) believe that there is a proportional relation between the size of the moving object and the distance traveled by the stationary object and (b) can engage in calibration-based reasoning about this size/distance relation. Second, female infants precede males by a few weeks in this development, for reasons that may be related to sex differences in the maturation of depth perception.
KW - Calibration-based reasoning
KW - Collision events
KW - Infants
KW - Physical knowledge
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U2 - 10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00036-5
DO - 10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00036-5
M3 - Article
C2 - 9775513
AN - SCOPUS:0032527195
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 67
SP - 311
EP - 351
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 3
ER -