Skepticism

In learning about infant’s perception of their physical world we have been presented with many interesting theories and ways of testing and measuring an infant’s development and their understanding of the objects in their world. While many of these ways of measuring infant’s development of their perception of the physical world seem logical, I couldn’t help but be skeptical about some of them.
One thing that stirred up some skepticism in me was Elizabeth Spelke’s paper on the Origins of Physical Knowledge, in particular her section related to language and conceptual development. Throughout the class thus far, we have discussed the development of physical knowledge based on infant’s looking behavior, which makes complete sense when taking into account the fact that infants are not capable of speech. However, I couldn’t help but think about how much speech actually contributes to the development of physical knowledge. Spelke makes the argument that language does not play an important role in the development of physical knowledge because the act of merely observing an object does not require one to “articulate the principles of one’s theory or communicate with others about it.” This seems completely reasonable, but it seems to me that the development of physical knowledge also relies on language because it seems impossible that an infant would be able to develop a complete understanding of its physical world before it could verbally inquire about it.
Something else presented in class and in the readings that has made me think twice has to do with the concept of the A not B error. When watching the videos in which an infant is presented with an interesting object that is covered by one of two clothes, one cannot help but notice that the infant is given verbal encouragement to find the object, verbally rewarded when the infant pulls off the right cloth, and then reinforced when the infant is able to grab and play with the object. My question is, how much does the reward and the positive reinforcement influence the infant in choosing which cover to pull off? In other words, is it possible that the infant continues to go to the incorrect cloth even though he/she knows that the object is not there due to the verbal encouragement that he/she received? Has this ever been controlled for in the A not B study? The idea is especially intriguing to me because it has been said that babies will look at the correct cloth hiding the object while they are pulling off the cloth that was previously hiding the object. Are they continuing to make the same mistake repeatedly because they think they are pleasing their parent or the adult involved in the experiment?
In lecture we discussed the development of concrete operations and the diagnostic tasks used to assess this development such as the conservation, seriation, and class inclusion tasks. In watching the videos which showed these tasks in action, I could not help but think that it was quite possible that some of the children produced incorrect responses not because they were cognitively unable to do so, but because the could not understand why the adults were asking them the silly questions. Also, I think that they may have made the errors that they did because they were assuming that the adults asking the questions knew better than to ask such questions.
Thus far, the readings and lecture in this class have provided me with a better understanding of how children gain an understanding of their physical world. I think it would prove useful to look into how researchers such as Spelke and Baillargeon control for some of the problems that arise in their studies in order to gain an even better grasp of cognitive development.