Nicholas Schulman 9.30.14 Bob Merala 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. 1a. Children in the sensorimotor stage experience the world through the use of their senses, such as touching and hearing things, and through motor actions, such as grabbing and mouthing objects. 1b. Object permanence is the understanding that an object will still exist even if it isn’t present …show more content…
1c. Stranger anxiety is the fear of new people, due to a lack of schemas for unfamiliar faces. According to Piaget stranger anxiety emerges at around 8 months old. It is understood that stranger anxiety and object permanence emerge around the same time, this is due to the fact that when a child develops object permanence they begin to develop schemas for the objects and people that are familiar to them, so when an unfamiliar person comes into their life they compare them to existing schema, but cant find a match and become scared and anxious and look for a familiar person. 1d. McCrink and Wynn outlined a theory that infants have the ability to perform mathematical operations with large numbers and this is due to a basic number sense that allows for infants to develop a system for large values and to understand when a value should be less or more, and also possess an system for smaller values to track their movement and location, but there large value system is not dependent on their tracking system. Piaget’s view differed from this due to the fact that he believe that infants did not posses a pre-formed mathematical operation system, but …show more content…
2a. The habituation technique is when a stimulus is presented to an infant and each time the stimulus is presented they become less responsive, due to them adapting to the stimulus. Habituation is when you become less attentive to something that is constantly being repeated. Habituation helps researchers test the cognitive capacity of infants by determining how well an infant can remember a certain stimulus, if it is repeated and then a new stimulus is presented, or how well they can discriminate a new stimulus from a repeated one. 2b. Another technique that could be used for determining cognitive capacity is one where infants are shown a series of flashcards that have a picture of an animal on one side and its name on the other side and then they are given pictures of the animals they were shown and then shown a name of one of the animals and told to match the name with the picture of the animal, to see if they are able to match corresponding objects. 2c. The advantages of using the habituation technique over the technique previously just described is that the habituation techniques doesn’t require infants to remember multiple animals and their names and the habituation technique focuses on just simple cognitive function such as memory, not multiple cognitive functions and the habituation only requires a single repeated stimulus, and the other requires multiple