Innate?

Jean Piaget argued that children go through stages of development. That, these stages are not innate, rather, they are learned through interactions with the environment. He believed these stages to be in a particular sequence, hierarchical, with each possessing a new way of thinking, and each being domain general. Researchers, like Spelke, have argued that some of the information that infants have is, in fact, innate and that the reason this was not detected in Piaget’s research is due to limitations in testing methods. Are some of these abilities innate? I think this is a really interesting question. To me it seems unlikely that we will ever really know the answer though. One of my closest friends had a baby in June, I find it amazing that so much conclusive research has been done on two and a half year old babies, because it would be so hard to test them. I can’t imagine trying to get Sydney to do some of the things that are done in these studies. For one think attention span is so short and awake time is not much longer. They can hardly hold their heads up, and have poor eyesight. Alone these limitations present important challenges. But, you also have to take into account that, it is so hard to be sure that what you think you are measuring is, in fact, what is being measured. It is so hard to definitively know what the baby is thinking or reacting to. Several people, in class, have brought up valid possible alternative explanations to babies attentiveness. I understand that most of these possible alternative explanations have likely been tested for, but, as subject, babies present a lot of limitations, and questions. Honestly, I am not completely sure why the question of innate or not is that important. To an extent I get it. Because we will tailor how we treat, and teach children based on our understanding of their developmental abilities. And, it is true that researchers have come up with better mobiles, and things of that nature, based on better understanding of how babies see. So, it is conceivable that a better understanding of babies cognitive abilities will further help researchers make more appropriate and interesting toys for babies. Things like Baby Einstein (I think) even claim to be more stimulating and even educational than other mediums for babies, I assume based on this type of infant research. But, I am not sure that the question of innate can be answered. The Spelke article said that two and a half month old babies are the youngest tested thus far, and I don’t know how you could go younger. And, arguably, having some of the reactions that Spelke found so young very possibly implies innate knowledge, but a lot of observation has also been done by this point. Perhaps I am just jaded by all the psych classes I have taken, but nature never seems to be the answer and nurture never seems to be either. It is almost always a combination of both, and this case doesn’t appear to be any different. I think these challenges of the Piagetian model are much more interesting in the later stages. This stuff that we talked about on Wednesday was, I think, really important. An understanding of where kids are at developmentally can be helpful in their education, stimulating play, the ability to gauge what they can and can not handle, or just manipulating them into thinking that they got two cookies rather than one by splitting the one in half. Those videos are entertaining to watch, because the kids are cute, and the mistakes funny. I remember being a kid, my twin sister and I would have to spilt stuff all the time, we really worked hard trying to make sure that it was either even down to the last crumb, or that we somehow scammed more than the other. Remembering that so clearly it seems so crazy, to me, that at that same age we could have been so easily miss lead, on what now seems like very basic forms of measurement. The other important bit of information, that was demonstrated by both models is that, kids can learn these things by repeated exposure. Knowing where kids are less cognitively developed can help researchers know what they need to be exposed to more.