Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Infant Development
- The Cambridge Handbook of Infant Development
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Preface
- Part I Foundations
- Part II Perceptual Development
- Part III Cognitive Development
- 12 Infant Memory
- 13 Infant Physical Knowledge
- 14 Infant Categorization
- 15 Early Knowledge About Space and Quantity
- 16 Infant Learning in the Digital Age
- Part IV Action
- Part V Language
- Part VI Emotional and Social Development
- Index
- References
13 - Infant Physical Knowledge
from Part III - Cognitive Development
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2020
Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Infant Development
- The Cambridge Handbook of Infant Development
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Preface
- Part I Foundations
- Part II Perceptual Development
- Part III Cognitive Development
- 12 Infant Memory
- 13 Infant Physical Knowledge
- 14 Infant Categorization
- 15 Early Knowledge About Space and Quantity
- 16 Infant Learning in the Digital Age
- Part IV Action
- Part V Language
- Part VI Emotional and Social Development
- Index
- References
Summary
Physical reasoning is the ability to go beyond the information in the immediate perceptual array. For example, if I were to dangle my keys in front of me with the intention of letting go of them, everyone would predict that the moment I let go of the keys, they will fall towards the ground. Similarly, if I hide my keys behind my back, everyone has the expectation that the keys continue to exist and that the shape and size of the keys remain the same as they were before they were hidden from view. These two examples demonstrate that people share the same basic ideas about how objects behave and interact. These expectations may be universal across all humans, and they may even be shared by some other species. However, researchers are still puzzled by some aspects of these fundamental abilities. For instance, even though most people can effortlessly draw similar predictions about these events, we have yet to build a computer that can rival the physical reasoning abilities of a typically developing 1-year-old infant. In this chapter, we argue that one way to resolve some of the mysteries about physical reasoning is to look at the origins of the abilities and how they change over time. We start by reviewing the literature on the physical reasoning abilities of human infants.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Handbook of Infant DevelopmentBrain, Behavior, and Cultural Context, pp. 363 - 380Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
References
Anderson, E., Hespos, S. J., & Rips, L. (2018). Five-month-old infants have expectations for the accumulation of nonsolid substances. Cognition, 175, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.02.009Google Scholar
Baillargeon, R., & DeVos, J. (1991). Object permanence in young infants: Further evidence. Child Development, 62(6), 1227–1246.Google Scholar
Baillargeon, R., Needham, A., & DeVos, J. (1993). The development of young infants’ intuitions about support. Infant and Child Development, 1(2), 69–78.Google Scholar
Baillargeon, R., Stavans, M., Wu, D., Gertner, R., Setoh, P., Kittredge, A. K., & Bernard, A. (2012). Object individuation and physical reasoning in infancy: An integrative account. Language Learning and Development, 8, 4–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bourgeois, K. S., Khawar, A. W., Neal, A., & Lockman, J. (2005). Infant manual exploration of objects, surfaces, and their interrelations, Infancy, 8, 233–252,Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1996). Learning how to structure space for language: A crosslinguistic perspective. In Bloom, P., Peterson, M. A., Nadel, L., & Garrett, M. F. (Eds.), Language and space (pp. 385–436). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2003). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition. In Gentner, D. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (Eds.), Language in mind (pp. 387–428). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Casasola, M. Bhagwat, J., Doan, S. N., & Love, H. (2017). Getting some space: Infants’ and caregivers’ containment and support spatial constructions during play. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 159, 110–128.Google Scholar
Casasola, M., & Cohen, L. (2002). Infant categorization of containment, support, and tight-fit spatial relationships. Developmental Science, 5(2), 247–264.Google Scholar
Cheries, E. W., Mitroff, S. R., Wynn, K., & Scholl, B. J. (2008). Cohesion as a constraint on object persistence in infancy. Developmental Science, 11, 427–432.Google Scholar
Chiang, W. C., & Wynn, K. (2000). Infants’ tracking of objects and collections. Cognition, 77, 169–195.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Choi, S., & Bowerman, M. (1991). Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns. Cognition, 41(1–3), 83–121.Google Scholar
Choi, S., McDonough, L., Bowerman, M., & Mandler, J. M. (1999). Early sensitivity to language-specific spatial categories in English and Korean. Cognitive Development, 14(2), 241–268.Google Scholar
Gentner, D., & Bowerman, M. (2009). Why some spatial semantic categories are harder to learn than others: The typological prevalence hypothesis. In Guo, J., Lieven, E., Ervin-Tripp, S., Budwig, N., Özçaliskan, S., & Nakamura, K. (Eds.). Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin (pp. 465–480). New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Hespos, S. J., & Baillargeon, R. (2001a). Infants’ knowledge about occlusion and containment: A surprising discrepancy. Psychological Science, 12(2), 141–147.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hespos, S. J., (2001b). Reasoning about containment events in very young infants. Cognition, 78, 207–245.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hespos, S. J., (2006). Decalage in infants’ reasoning about occlusion and containment events: Converging evidence from action tasks. Cognition, 99, B31–B41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hespos, S. J., (2008). Young infants’ actions reveal their developing knowledge of support variables: Converging evidence for violation-of-expectation findings. Cognition, 107(1), 304–316.Google Scholar
Hespos, S. J., Ferry, A., Anderson, E., Hollenbeck, E., & Rips, L. (2016). Five-month-old infants have expectations about how substances behave and interact. Psychological Science, 27(2), 244–256. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615617897Google Scholar
Hespos, S. J., Ferry, A., & Rips, L. (2009). Five-month-old infants have different expectations for solids and liquids. Psychological Science, 20(5), 603–611.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hespos, S. J., & Spelke, E. S. (2004). Conceptual precursors to spatial language. Nature, 430, 453–456.Google Scholar
Hespos, S. J., & vanMarle, K. (2012). Physics for infants: Characterizing the origins of knowledge about objects, substances, and number. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 3(1), 19–27.Google ScholarPubMed
Higgins, C., Campos, J., & Kermoian, R. (1996). Effects of self-produced locomotion on infant postural compensation to optic flow. Developmental Psychology, 32, 836–841.Google Scholar
Huntley-Fenner, G., Carey, S., & Solimando, A. (2002). Objects are individuals but stuff doesn’t count: Perceived rigidity and cohesiveness influence infants’ representations of small groups of discrete entities. Cognition, 85, 203–221.Google Scholar
Imai, M., & Mazuka, R. (2007). Language-relative construal of individuation constrained by universal ontology: Revisiting language universals and linguistic relativity. Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 31(3), 385–413.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Izard, V., Sann, C., Spelke, E. S., & Streri, A. (2009). Newborn infants perceive abstract numbers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(25), 10382–10385.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jordan, K. E., Brannon, E. M., Logothetis, N. K., & Ghazanfar, A. A. (2005). Monkeys match the number of voices they hear to the number of faces they see. Current Biology, 15(11), 1034–1038.Google Scholar
Kourtzi, Z., & Kanwisher, N. (2001). Representation of the perceived object shape by the human lateral occipital complex. Science, 293(5534), 1506–1509.Google Scholar
Lipton, J. S., & Spelke, E. S. (2003). Origins of number sense. Large-number discrimination in human infants. Psychological Science, 14, 396–401.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lloyd-Fox, S., Blasi, A., McCann, S., Rozhiko, M., Katus, L., Mason, L., … Elwell, C. E. (2019). Habituation and novelty detection fNIRS brain responses in 5- and 8-month-old infants: The Gambia and UK. Developmental Science, 22(5), e12817. doi: 10.1111/desc.12817Google Scholar
Needham, A., & Baillargeon, R. (1993). Intuitions about support in 4.5-month-old infants. Cognition, 47, 121–148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oakes, L. M., (2017). Sample size, statistical power, and false conclusions in infant looking-time research. Infancy, 22, 436–469.Google Scholar
Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children. New York, NY: W. W Norton & Co.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. New York, NY: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rips, L. J., & Hespos, S. J. (2015). Mental divisions of the physical world: Objects and substances. Psychological Bulletin, 141(4), 786–811.Google Scholar
Rochat, P. (1992). Self-sitting and reaching in 5- to 8-month-old infants: The impact of posture and its development on early eye–hand coordination. Journal of Motor Behavior, 24(2), 210–220.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, R. D., & Carey, S. (2009). Infants’ representations of material entities. In Hood, B. M. & Santos, L. R. (Eds.), The origins of object knowledge (pp. 165–188). Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slone, L. K., Moore, D. S., & Johnson, S. P. (2018) Object exploration facilitates 4-month-olds’ mental rotation performance. PLoS ONE 13(8), e0200468.Google Scholar
Sommerville, J. A., Woodward, A. L., & Needham, A. (2005). Action experience alters 3-month-old infants’ perception of others’ actions. Cognition, 96(1), B1–B11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Soska, K. C., & Adolph, K. E. (2014). Postural position constrains multimodal object exploration in infants. Infancy, 19(2), 138–161.Google Scholar
Spelke, E. S. (1990). Principles of object perception. Cognitive Science, 14(1), 29–56.Google Scholar
Spelke, E. S., Breinlinger, K., Macomber, J., & Jacobson, K. (1992). Origins of knowledge. Psychological Review, 99(4), 605–632.Google Scholar
Spelke, E. S., & Kinzler, K. D. (2007). Core knowledge. Developmental Science, 10(1), 89–96. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00569.xGoogle Scholar
Stahl, A. E., & Feigenson, L. (2015). Observing the unexpected enhances infants’ learning and exploration. Science, 348(6230), 91–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wang, S., Baillargeon, B., & Paterson, S. (2005). Detecting continuity violations in infancy: a new account and new evidence from covering and tube events. Cognition, 95(2), 129–173.Google Scholar