Carlos Saravia
Bob Melara
PSY 102
September 28, 2015
“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 olds in a task that involves possible and impossible outcomes. Piaget’s theory specifies the cognitive competencies of children of this age. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development are broken up into 4 different stages which encompass how people develop from when they are an infant all the way to adulthood. The first stage is from birth to the age of two, it’s the sensorimotor stage. 1a. Children in the sensorimotor stage experience…show more content… Infants tend to prefer familiar voices, which is why they’re fine around their parents. However, when they hear unfamiliar voices or see unfamiliar people they feel threatened and begin to cry or show other signs of distress. Stanger anxiety is an infant’s way of protecting itself from those they consider unfamiliar and potentially threatening. Since infants lack object permanence, they most likely forget about faces they don’t see often or haven’t seen at all, and only see them as threats. 1d. In the article “Large Number Addition and Subtraction by 9-Month Old Infants”, by Koleen McCrink and Karen Wynn, McCrink and Wynn describe how infants are able to conduct basic arithmetical operations through the using an automatic system that can track objects. When conducting experiments, they added and subtracted from a group of objects, and then tracked how infants reacted. The infants were more interested in the incorrect outcomes, supporting the idea that an infant’s automatic system could track these objects. This goes against Piaget’s idea that infant’s lack object permanence because if they’re able to track objects long enough to realize whether…show more content… 2a.Habituation describes an infant’s decreasing reaction to stimuli after being exposed to it multiple times. On the other hand, dishabituation is when infants react to a stimulus that they’ve already seen as if it were new. Using this method, researchers are able to identify whether infants remember certain objects or people, and a result are able to gain further insight into the idea of object permanence, and if Piaget’s theory that infants lack this at an early age is indeed correct. 2b. An alternative technique that can be used in order to test the cognitive abilities of infants was performed by Karen Wynn in 1992 when she placed 2 dolls in a case, put up a screen to cover the dolls, removed a doll, then dropped the screen to reveal the new outcome. Two possible outcomes were tested, the correct one, and the incorrect one. Wynn noticed that babies stared longer at the incorrect answer which demonstrated an infant’s number sense. 2c. The advantage to using the habituation technique is that using this technique you are testing whether children remember the stimuli that they’re presented, and therefore can prove how much a child can learn and