tailieunhanh - Infants’ reasoning about hidden objects: evidence for event-general and event-specific expectations

By asking her RSS reader to subscribe to the URL of an RSS feed, a user instructs the application to begin fetch- ing that URL at regular intervals. When it is retrieved, its XML payload is interpreted as a list of RSS items by the application. Items may be composed of just a head- line, an article summary, or a complete story in HTML; each entry must have a unique ID, and is frequently ac- companied by a permanent URL (“permalink”) to a Web version of that entry. To the user, each item typically appears in a chronologically-sorted list; in this way, RSS client applications have become, for many users,. | Developmental Science 7 4 2004 pp 391-424 ARTICLE WITH PEER COMMENTARIES AND RESPONSE Infants reasoning about hidden objects evidence for event-general and event-specific expectations Renée Baillargeon Department of Psychology University of Illinois USA For commentaries on this article see Hood 2004 Leslie 2004 and Bremner and Mareschal 2004 . Abstract Research over the past 20 years has revealed that even very young infants possess expectations about physical events and that these expectations undergo significant developments during the first year of life. In this article I first review some of this research focusing on infants expectations about occlusion containment and covering events all of which involve hidden objects. Next I present an account of infants physical reasoning that integrates these various findings and describe new experiments that test predictions from this account. Finally because all of the research I discuss uses the violation-of-expectation method I address recent concerns about this method and summarize new findings that help alleviate these concerns. Introduction As adults we possess a great deal of knowledge about the physical world which we use for many different purposes for example to predict and interpret the outcomes of physical events to guide our actions on objects to interpret others actions and even to entertain or deceive others. Over the past 20 years my collaborators and I have been studying how infants use their developing physical knowledge to predict and interpret the outcomes of the physical events they observe. As we all know Piaget 1952 1954 was the first researcher to examine the development of infants physical knowledge. Through his observations and writings Piaget raised many fascinating questions about infants understanding of objects space time and causality. Unfortunately Piaget did not have access to the sophisticated new methods available to us today and so his conclusions tended to underestimate infants .