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-months old(s) in a task that involves possible and impossible outcomes. Piaget’s theory specifies the cognitive competencies of children of this age. Piaget theorised that cognition -thinking, knowing and remembering passed through a set of childhood milestones or stages each labeled as a critical period, the zone in time in which experience has its maximum effect on the brain. (1a) Piaget’s first stage is the sensorimotor stage. This stage occurs early in children typically ranging from infancy to two years of age. The sensorimotor stage is responsible for children observing their surroundings and learn from it through sight, hearing, touch/grasp and mouth/taste. As we age, so does our cognitive functionality and capability. As infants, we lack optimal cognitive functionality, so we tend to live in the present without awareness. (1b) When awareness of an object’s existence ceases after it can’t be seen, the individual shows a lack of object permanence. Piaget believed that infants younger than 6 months go by the saying “Out of sight-out of mind,” whilst infants 8 months and older develop object permanence. Object permanence emerges because infants are always learning. They think like “little scientists”. Object permanence is needed as young children test ideas and learn from patterns. Along with infants developing their cognitive minds, they also develop their social-emotional behaviours which tends to follow the development of object permanence. Around this time, infants come to prefer familiar faces and cry when greeted by and left alone with strangers. (1c)This reaction is called stranger anxiety: a fear of strangers.Object permanence and stranger anxiety might emerge at the same time as a result of schemas. Infants around 8 months already developed schemas for family members, however, if the infant can’t recognise a new face they will become afraid of the stranger, and thus will cry and reach out for family. (1d)McCrink and Wynn’s theory of cognitive competency states that infants from 5 months of age have the ability to execute numerical computations over represented magnitudes. This differs from Piaget’s theory in that infants would not be able to perform such calculations as they lack the awareness that objects continue to exist even when not perceived. Without object permanence, Piaget argues that the memories of infants are too fragile. McCrink and Wynn’s experiment suggests that infants can compute numerical combination and manipulation, even before the powerful tool of language develops.
Habituation is a method that might be used to explore predictions of Piaget’s theory. (2a)Habituation is the event where a person or organism begins to lose interest when exposed to the same stimulation for an increasing number of times. The mind becomes adjusted to the stimulation, thus canceling any response to said stimulation. Dishabituation is the recovery of stimuli that has undergone habituation causing the person to treat it as new. This method is favored in measuring cognitive processes in infants as it allows the researcher to observe what an infant can see and remember by noting how responsive the child was to seeing something familiar thus presenting habitation. If there was a positive response, such as extended eye contact or laughter, the infant accepted the new stimulation as something new to enjoy. However, if the infant is presented with the same stimulation again and it loses interest or seems bored with the stimulation, it understands what it was previously shown. (2b)Within days after birth, our brain’s neural networks were imprinted with the scent of our mother’s body. So, an alternative technique researchers could use to test the cognitive capacity of infants is to see how they will compare on recognition of their mother’s scent. Research from Mcfarlane 1978 shows that week-old nursing babies, placed between a gauze pad from their mother’s bra and one from another nursing mother, have usually turned toward the smell of their own mother’s pad. This scent lasts. Moreover, mothers who breastfeed and use scented nipple balms foster children that will grow to become familiar with the balm used. If infants are presented with scented balms used by their mothers, then we will expect for them to smile or giggle longer than unscented ones. By using scent, infants can learn to recognise and differentiate who their mothers were by emotional facial cues. This experiment conveys their ability of memory and scent perception. (2c)The advantage of using the habituation technique with infants over the alternative technique is that the system of sensing smell is massively complex compared to that of vision. Vision has two receptors in the eyes, rods and cones to intake light and three basic colour receptors; red, green, and blue. As for smell, there are no distinct receptors. Olfactory neurons bypass the brain’s sensory control centre, the thalamus. Odors trigger combinations of receptors producing at least one trillion odors.
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. (3a) The experimental procedure that takes place in figure 1 takes 5 steps to complete. The steps go as follows: 1) Objects are placed in a case. 2) A screen comes up to cover the objects. 3) An empty hand reaches in and enters the enclosure. 4) The empty hand removes one of the objects. At this point there could be two possible outcomes. Possibility 5a) The screen drops revealing one object; the correct response. Or possibility 5b) The screen drops revealing the same number of objects originally placed in the eclouse; the wrong response. (3b) This experiment has two different conditions, the possible and impossible outcomes. The impossible outcome would most appropriately be deemed the experimental condition as the infant’s cognitive ability to recognise mathematical outcomes is being tested. As there are two conditions there will also be two groups of infants being tested (the addition for impossible outcome and subtraction for the possible one) to measure variability. This is needed as infants can show visual bias, looking longer or shorter at items/images that pleases or does not please them. This is significant as bias can produce outliers when quantifying data. The possible outcome group would be deemed the control group. This group is needed to evaluate the difference in cognitive ability between infants. (3c) Habituation is detected in the recognition and response time of the stimulus. If the object is new and unfamiliar to the infant, they may respond by looking longer at it whilst a familiar object will have a lower response time. The independent variable to the experiment is the possible and impossible outcomes and the dependent variable is the staring response time. This is relevant because, if the science behind “baby math” can be explained by habituation then Piagets’s case for the state of their memories being too fragile to conduct math may possibly be valid.
Figure 2 contains results from the experiment. The results bear strongly on the experimental hypothesis. (4a) The experimental hypothesis Piaget theorised was that, since infants lack object permanence during the early phase of the sensorimotor stage, they will not easily dishabituate to objects once they disappear from view. Piaget did not believe that infants came with innate math skills to be used after the first few months of life. Instead, his main theory revolved on the basis that cognitive development consisted of four major stages. An alternative hypothesis produced by McCrink and Wynn is that infants develop sensorimotor competencies earlier than Piaget supposed, allowing infants to dishabituate to the impossible outcome. It is through their research that we have concluded that infants have specialised object-tracking processes that apply only with small numbers and a numerical system for estimating and calculating magnitudes for larger values. (4b) An outcome of the current experiment that would support Piaget’s experimental hypothesis correlates to the concept of object permanence. Without object permanence, the response time in recognising the items could remain stagnant as they aren’t aware or are in understanding of the situation at hand. In this case,. Infants will stare at both the possible and impossible outcomes the same amount of time showing that they failed to dishabituate to the impossible outcome. For the alternative hypothesis produced by McCrink and Wynn to be supported, the infants would have to be dishabituated to the incorrect values. This would provide evidence for the specialised object tracking process of infants thus exemplifying early baby math competency. (4c)The actual outcome of this experiment conveyed that infants have a basic mathematical number tracking process as they stared longer at impossible outcomes. As all the infants stare longer at the incorrect values, the dishabituation is 1:0 or 100% greater than the correct values(possible outcome). To calculate the statistical difference between conditions, the standard deviation needs to be calculated for each group (control and experimental) then assessed. The larger value of the two will have more variation. (4d) The results of the experiment disproved Piaget’s hypothesis. Piaget believed that infants exhibit object permanence on average of 8 months, however, there is evidence that support infants as young as 5 months can exhibit object permanence as they are dishabituated by mathematically false calculations. As a result, this proves the alternative hypothesis produced by McCrink and Wynn indicating that infants can obtain emerge permanence earlier than Piaget realised aiding infants in object tracking systems.
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. (5a) If the processing time allowed increased from 1 second to 10 from the first diagram to the third, the explanation could be that since the original set-up allowed the infants to compute the outcome value in less time, they will take more notice to the incorrect value as everything happens in a short moment. However, if the time increased to 10 seconds, the infants can easily forget or become distracted as there’s no visual stimulation to entertain them. As a result, when the screen was dropped, infants couldn’t display their sense of object permanence to conduct the specialised object tracking that extended to math based problems as well. It is because of this analysis that the results in figure 2 and 3 can both be true. However, the results don’t coincide with with conclusion made in 4d as it would support Piaget in his theory that infants under 8 months do not exhibit object permanence nor basic mathematical computational skills. (5b)In a hypothetical scenario where Piaget would be able to evaluate the data from figures 2 and 3, he would used figure 3 as the backbone of his hypothesis. This is because there is no real difference in response time between correct and incorrect values, thus supporting his idea infants in the early phase of the sensorimotor stage don’t exhibit object permanence. However, Piaget would not be able to support data from figure 2 as it goes against his theory and carries some evidence of infant information processing capabilities. (5c) After conducting their initial experiment, McCrink and Wynn conducted a follow up experiment where the infants were tested on a larger scale. Critics deemed that their simple computations of lower scale numbers weren’t attributed to math, but rather a simple object tracking system. So to test infant computation over a magnitude of larger numbers the habituation of response time between correct and incorrect values needs to be computed. McCrink and Wynn’s setup is the same as their original setup but instead of 2 objects, the infants had 5-10 to evaluate. Like before, the infants stare longer at the incorrect outcomes such as 5+5 is 5 and 10-5 is 10. Since the values are too large to commit to memory, the critic’s concern is addressed seeing how infants can’t respond to the mismatch of objects presented visually if their memory failed them. Therefore, the case can be made that infants can perform computation over a magnitude of large numbers.
