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psychlotron.org.uk Warning! This slideshow contains some Flash animations that are hosted on psychlotron.org.uk. These will only work if you are connected to the Internet. When you run this slideshow, it is likely that you will see a warning about ActiveX controls. You must allow the controls to run if you want the animations to work. The animations are available separately on psychlotron if you want to run them offline or embed them yourself. Is Piaget’s search task a valid test of object permanence? Today’s session You are learning about... You are learning to... Piaget’s sensorimotor stage Studies of object permanence by Bower and Baillargeon Describe and criticise ways of investigating infant cognition Search tasks Failure to search could imply lack of object permanence or: Loss of interest Limited working memory Inability to coordinate search movements Competence vs. performance A child might have object permanence (competence) but still not be able to search (performance) Competence = underlying ability to do something Performance = whether someone actually does it Piaget’s search task conflates (mixes up) competence and performance, leading him to underestimate infants’ abilities. This is a frequent criticism of all of Piaget’s methods for investigating children’s thinking. Can you think of a more valid way of testing for object permanence? Many researchers have adopted the child’s looking as a measure of object permanence Bower et al (1971) 5 month-old infants’ visual tracking was recorded as they watched a moving object disappear behind a screen. Bower et al (1971) What would Piaget predict to happen once the object has disappeared behind the screen? Bower Wishart (1972) 4 month-old infants shown a toy. Lights were turned off so the room was in complete darkness. Infants were observed with an infra-red camera. What would Piaget predict about the child’s behaviour once the room was darkened? Why might we argue that Bower’s tests of object