Preferential looking

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Preferential looking is an experimental method in developmental psychology used to gain insight into the young mind/brain.

1 General account
2 Summary of findings
3 Extended example
4 Labs using preferential looking
5 Studies employing preferential looking
6 References
7 See also

[edit] General account

In a preferential-looking experiment, an infant is habituated to some stimulus or other — a visual display of interacting objects, for example. Then the infant is shown a second stimulus that differs from the first in a specific manner. If the average infant looks longer at the second stimulus, this suggests that the infant can discriminate between the stimuli. This method has been used extensively in cognitive science and developmental psychology to assess the character of infant's perceptual systems, and, by extension, innate cognitive faculties.

[edit] Summary of findings

Conclusions have been drawn from preferential looking experiments about the knowledge that infants possess. For example, if an infant looks longer at a stimulus that appears to violate a rule, then it has sometimes been concluded that the infant knows the rule.

For example, a very young infant might be shown an object that appears to teleport, violating the rule that objects move in continuous paths. If this stimulus induces longer looking times than similar stimuli that do not involve teleportation, then, so the argument goes, infants expect that objects obey the continuity rule, and are surprised when they appear to do so. Common criticisms include that the infant has already acquired enough experience of non-teleporting objects to justify its surprise,^{[citation needed]} and that teleporting objects are attention-grabbing for reasons other than expectancy violation^{[citation needed]}

Findings from preferential looking experiments have suggested that humans innately possess sets of beliefs about how objects interact ("folk physics" or "folk mechanics") and about how animate beings interact ("folk psychology").

Preferential looking experiments have been cited in support of hypotheses regarding a wide range of inborn cognitive capacities, including:

Depth perception
Face perception
Basic arithmetic (numeracy)
- Brannon, Elizabeth (April 2002). "The development of ordinal numerical knowledge in infancy". Cognition 83 (3): 223–240. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00005-7.
- Wynn, Karen; Paul Bloom and Wen-Chi Chiang. "Enumeration of collective entities by 5-month-old infants". Cognition. Lay summary.

[edit] Extended example

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[edit] Labs using preferential looking

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[edit] Studies employing preferential looking

Ball, W.A. (April 1973). "The perception of causality in the infant". . Paper presented at the Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia

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[edit] References

Spelke, E. S. (1994). Initial knowledge: Six suggestions. Cognition, 50, 431-445. (Reprinted in J. Mehler and S. Franck (Eds.) Cognition on Cognition, pp. 433-448. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.)