Exploratory: Origins of Knowledge

[Jessiebanana]

Crashed and failed at posting on Felix .

[derek]

Hey, Jessica,

No problem -- I'm posting your exploratory here as plain text so that others can read it. In the future you can just copy and paste your exploratory text rather than uploading the document; that should make the process much less prone to frustration!

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Jessica Mathis
September 21, 2008

Origins of Knowledge Exploratory

I am going to focus on the arguments made in this paper and not the experiments in and of themselves. As far as critique of technique, I believe they attacked themselves by far harsher than I anything I could have come up with, nor did they over stretch their results.

This paper is the best argument against the Piageten theory of knowledge derived from action and perception. The part that makes the Central-Origin Theory unique and significant is that it provides evidence that young infants truly do understand objects and that those objects are independent from action. The problem that I had with the other articles that found that even though infants did not reach for the object in right location, but that they turned their head in the direction of the impossible event, is that they did not convince me that the infants truly understood what was going on. I wasn’t convinced that the infants understood why they were shocked, only that they were shocked and had some unconscious reaction that might have been important to later development of that understanding. Here I was convinced that infants do in fact have an understanding of objects and that they can understand objects completely separate from sensory-motor experience. The main points that got me were the relation to adult reasoning, the proof of prediction of unseen objects and the discrepancy between understanding solidity and continuity and inertia and gravity and what that would mean in relation to experience.

In experiment 2 inferences about the occluded object’s motion depended on the infant’s representation of the size of the ball and the size of gap. That result blew me out of water. It potentially throws any argument we’ve ever made about parallel systems in the trash. This task was all about relativity. The ball in the habituation trial went through because it was small enough to fit through the hole and so was the ball in the consistent trial. The ball in the inconsistent trial shouldn’t have went through because of it was too large. So not only did the infant have to keep the size of the ball in their heads, but the infant also had to keep the size of the hole in their head and compare the two to come to any significant result. Any knowledge of the size of the ball to the hole would have had to be an abstract knowledge that they applied to this situation, knowledge of continuity and solidity. I say that because the test was such specific tasks that any knowledge derived from experience would unlikely apply to this situation. The point is the infant had to use the theory and this use implied and understanding and well and some evidence towards a more mature process.

How can infants have such a mature process as well as immature processes? I like the idea and steady comparison of what an adult finds impossible to what infants find impossible in the experiments. If our understanding of inertia and gravity is experience driven, then I can be expected that infants would be lacking in this arena, but if our understanding of solidity and continuity than it would be plausible to ask when that became solid. They proved that infants lacking diverse sensory-motor experience where able to exercise principles of solidity and continuity that you might expect to see in older infants if Piaget was right. The only other reasonable explanation in that cognition develops separate from action. They bring up what might you might expect an infant to know had this knowledge developed from that limited experience and when you look at it from that perspective it doesn’t seem plausible. Infants should have done better on the gravity and inertia test as they are just as exposed to gravity and inertia as they are to continuity and solidity. They also bring up that infants also witness events where continuity and solidity appear to be violated, as far as their ability to explain the events goes, yet they did well on those test. This is enough to convince me to look at infant cognitive development and human development differently and I would be interested to know if other people felt as strongly, especially Lauren, because she seemed to agree with me on knowledge driven by action and perception.

[derek]

Hey, Jessica,

In reading your exploratory, I was struck by what you wrote about the seemingly "unconscious" reactions shown by infants in some of the other object understanding studies we've read. One that that would be interesting to think about for discussion is the question of what it really *means*, in cognitive terms, for infants to have these kinds of reactions. That is, if infants react to a phenomenon consistently but without awareness, should we think of them as knowing something about that phenomenon? Or not?

This also ties into something you said about the role of prediction in Spelke's studies. To what extent does the infants' apparent prediction in the Spelke paper give us more confidence that they actually understand the displays as opposed to simply having an intelligible perceptual reaction to them? To me this seems pretty important, but I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts...

Derek