Piaget’s work led him to conclude that infants younger than 9 months have no innate knowledge of how the world works or any sense of ‘object permanence’ (that people and things still exist even when they’re not seen). Instead, babies must gradually construct this knowledge from experience. Piaget’s ‘constructivist’ theories were massively influential on postwar educators and psychologists, but over the past 20 years or so they have been largely set aside by a new generation of ‘nativist’ psychologists and cognitive scientists whose more sophisticated experiments led them to theorise that infants arrive already equipped with some knowledge of the physical world and even rudimentary programming for math and language.
Sirois’ experiments indicate that a baby’s fascination with physically impossible events merely reflects a response to stimuli that are novel. Data from the eye tracker and the measurement of the pupils (which widen in response to arousal or interest) show that impossible events involving familiar objects are no more interesting than possible events involving novel objects. In other words, when Daniel (the subject of previous experiments) had seen the red train come out of the tunnel green a few times, he gets as bored as when it stays the same colour.
Questions
1. Jean Piaget thinks infants younger than 9 months won’t know something existing
2. Jean Piaget thinks babies only get the knowledge
3. Some cognitive scientists think babies have the mechanism to learn a language
4. Sylvain Sirois thinks that babies can reflect a response to stimuli that are novel
5. Sylvain Sirois thinks babies' attention level will drop