(posted 4/06/06)
Reading assignment: Baillargeon (2004)
We will watch two 30-min videos (both available from Media Services). Then we'll discuss the Baillargeon (2004) article.
Infant Mind video
1. What is Object Permanence? What experiment did Rene Baillargeon conduct to show that 3-month-old babies have object premanence?
2. Elizabeth Bjork also did an experiment on object permanence. How does her study show that babies' error might indicate a memory problem rather than a conceptual error?
3. What has Carolyn Rovee-Collier (who is here at Rutgers) demonstrated about memory in very young babies?
4. Alan Leslie (who is also here at Rutgers) conducted some experiments on what infants know about cause and effect. Considering that babies can't talk, how did Leslie know when babies had induced a cause-effect relationship? What is dishabituation and how was it used in this experiment?
5. Jean Mandler conducted some experiments about how young children represent concepts and categories. What procedure did she use to test whether children thought two objects belonged in the same or different categories? What did her experiments show?
The Developing Child video
6. What is the nature vs. nurture debate? What does each side believe?
7. Zimbardo gives an explanation of habituation and dishabituation, in case you missed it in the first video.
8. What was Piaget's water volume conservation task?
9. This video gives describes more of Rene Baillargeon's studies on object permenance. How do these studies differ from those described in the first video?
10. What did Judy DeLoache's study on big Snoopy/little Snoopy demonstrate about children's mental representations?
11. What is the visual cliff task?