The Simple View implies that infants’ abilities to segment physical objects, represent them as persisting and track their causal intereactions is a consequence of their having beliefs concerning physical objects. The Simple View must be rejected because it generates incorrect multiple predictions.
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These findings falsify predictions of the Simple View.
The same discrepancy between looking and searching as evidence for abilities to track causal interactions has been found in adult nonhuman primates, specifically cotton-top tamarins (Santos, Seelig, & Hauser, 2006). Related discrepancies have also been found in other adult nonhuman primates (Gómez, 2005; Santos & Hood, 2009).1
Things Get Even Worse for the Simple View
If infants always manifested their object-tracking abilities on some types of measure (such as habituation, violation-of-expectation and anticipatory looking) while always failing on other measures (such as those involving search behaviours), we might be tempted to suppose that one type of measure is more sensitive than another.
But the relation between success and measure is more complex.
And on violation-of-expectation tasks, five-month-olds will not manifest an ability to track briefly unperceived objects that disappear by endarkening Charles & Rivera (2009) but will do so for objects that differ by occlusion (see Permanence).
This motivates considering alternatives to the Simple View.
Glossary
habituation : Habituation is used to test hypotheses about which events are interestingly different to an infant. In a habituation experiment, infants are shown an event repeatedly until it no longer holds their interest, as measured by how long they look at it. The infants are then divided into two (or more) groups and each group is shown a new event. How much longer do they look at the new event than at the most recent presentation of the old event? This difference in looking times indicates dishabituation, or the reawakening of interest. Given the assumption that greater dishabituation indicates that the old and new events are more interestingly different to the infant, evidence from patterns of dishabituation can sometimes support conclusions about patterns in how similar and different events are to infants.
Simple View : This term is used for two thematically related claims. Concerning physical objects, the Simple View is the claim that the Principles of Object Perception are things we know or believe, and we generate expectations from these principles by a process of inference. Concerning the goals of actions, the Simple View is the claim that the principles comprising the Teleological Stance are things we know or believe, and we are able to track goals by making inferences from these principles.
violation-of-expectation : Violation-of-expectation experiments test hypotheses about what infants expect by comparing their responses to two events. The responses compared are usually looking durations. Looking durations are linked to infants’ expectations by the assumption that, all things being equal, infants will typically look longer at something which violates an expectation of theirs than something which does not. Accordingly, with careful controls, it is sometimes possible to draw conclusions about infants’ expectations from evidence that they generally look longer at one event than another.
References
Aguiar, A., & Baillargeon, R. (1999). 2.5-month-old infants’ reasoning about when objects should and should not be occluded. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 116–157.
Babinsky, E., Braddick, O., & Atkinson, J. (2011). Infants and adults reaching in the dark. Experimental Brain Research, 217(2), 237–249. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2984-5
Berthier, N. E., De Blois, S., Poirier, C. R., Novak, M. A., & Clifton, R. K. (2000). Where’s the ball? Two- and three-year-olds reason about unseen events. Developmental Psychology, 36(3), 394–401.
Butler, S. C., Berthier, N. E., & Clifton, R. K. (2002). Two-year-olds’ search strategies and visual tracking in a hidden displacement task. Developmental Psychology, 38(4), 581–590.
Charles, E. P., & Rivera, S. M. (2009). Object permanence and method of disappearance: Looking measures further contradict reaching measures. Developmental Science, 12(6), 991–1006. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00844.x
Chiandetti, C., & Vallortigara, G. (2011). Intuitive physical reasoning about occluded objects by inexperienced chicks. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278(1718), 2621–2627. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.2381
Hespos, S., Gredebäck, G., Von Hofsten, C., & Spelke, E. S. (2009). Occlusion is hard: Comparing predictive reaching for visible and hidden objects in infants and adults. Cognitive Science, 33(8), 1483–1502. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01051.x
Hood, B., Cole-Davies, V., & Dias, M. (2003). Looking and search measures of object knowledge in preschool children. Developmental Science, 29(1), 61–70.
Jonsson, B., & Von Hofsten, C. (2003). Infants’ ability to track and reach for temporarily occluded objects. Developmental Science, 6(1), 86–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7687.00258
Kundey, S. M. A., Reyes, A. D. L., Taglang, C., Baruch, A., & German, R. (2010). Domesticated dogs’ (canis familiaris) use of the solidity principle. Animal Cognition, 13(3), 497–505. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-009-0300-6
Mash, C., Novak, E., Berthier, N. E., & Keen, R. (2006). What do two-year-olds understand about hidden-object events? Developmental Psychology, 42(2), 263–271. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.42.2.263
Santos, L. R., & Hood, B. M. (2009). Object representation as a central issue in cognitive science. In B. M. Hood & L. R. Santos (Eds.), The origins of object knowledge (pp. 1–23). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Santos, L. R., Seelig, D., & Hauser, M. D. (2006). Cotton-top tamarins’ (saguinus oedipus) expectations about occluded objects: A dissociation between looking and reaching tasks. Infancy, 9(2), 147–171. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327078in0902_4
Shinskey, J. L., & Munakata, Y. (2001). Detecting transparent barriers: Clear evidence against the means-end deficit account of search failures. Infancy, 2(3), 395–404.
Spelke, E. S., Breinlinger, K., Macomber, J., & Jacobson, K. (1992). Origins of knowledge. Psychological Review, 99(4), 605–632. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.99.4.605
Not all nonhumans have difficulties in searching for unperceived objects. Dogs have no difficulty using solidity when searching for an object (Kundey, Reyes, Taglang, Baruch, & German, 2010); and young chicks, unlike human infants (Shinskey & Munakata, 2001), will search for an object hidden behind a barrier (Chiandetti & Vallortigara, 2011). Primates may be special in finding it difficult to search for currently unperceived objects. ↩