Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-n8gtw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-08T13:18:03.441Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What we don't know about what babies know: Reconsidering psychophysics, exploration, and infant behavior

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2024

Karen E. Adolph Open the ORCID record for Karen E. Adolph [Opens in a new window]  and
Mark A. Schmuckler Open the ORCID record for Mark A. Schmuckler [Opens in a new window]
Karen E. Adolph*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA karen.adolph@nyu.edu https://www.nyuactionlab.com/
Mark A. Schmuckler
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, Scarborough, ON, Canada; mark.schmuckler@utoronto.ca https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/labs/infant/
*
*Corresponding author.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Researchers must infer “what babies know” based on what babies do. Thus, to maximize information from doing, researchers should use tasks and tools that capture the richness of infants' behaviors. We clarify Gibson's views about the richness of infants' behavior and their exploration in the service of guiding action – what Gibson called “learning about affordances.”

Information

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 47 , 2024 , e121
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Adolph, K. E. (1995). Psychophysical assessment of toddlers’ ability to cope with slopes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21, 734–750.Google ScholarPubMed
Adolph, K. E. (1997). Learning in the development of infant locomotion. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 62(3, Serial No. 251), 1–140.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Adolph, K. E. (2000). Specificity of learning: Why infants fall over a veritable cliff. Psychological Science, 11, 290–295.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adolph, K. E., Eppler, M. A., & Gibson, E. J. (1993). Crawling versus walking infants’ perception of affordances for locomotion over sloping surfaces. Child Development, 64, 1158–1174.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Adolph, K. E., Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., Ishak, S., Karasik, L. B., & Lobo, S. A. (2008). Locomotor experience and use of social information are posture specific. Developmental Psychology, 44, 1705–1714.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Blumberg, M. S., & Adolph, K. E. (2023). Protracted development of motor cortex constrains rich interpretations of infant cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27, 233–245.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Camras, L. A., Ujiie, T., Mayake, K., Wang, L., Murdoch, A., Meng, Z., … Campos, J. (2002). Observing emotion in infants: Facial expression, body behavior, and rater judgments of responses to an expectancy-violating event. Emotion, 2, 179–193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, J. J., & Gibson, E. J. (1981). Differentiation of an aperture from an obstacle under conditions of motion by three-month-old infants. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Boston, MA.Google Scholar
Cornsweet, T. N. (1962). The staircase-method in psychophysics. American Journal of Psychology, 75, 485–491.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E. J. (1952). The role of shock in reinforcement. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 45, 18–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibson, E. J. (1988). Exploratory behavior in the development of perceiving, acting, and the acquiring of knowledge. Annual Review of Psychology, 39, 1–41. doi:10.1146/annurev.ps.39.020188.000245CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E. J. (1991). An odyssey in learning and perception. MIT.Google Scholar
Gibson, E. J. (1997). Discovering the affordances of surfaces of support. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 62(3, Serial No. 251), 159–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E. J. (2002). Perceiving the affordances: A portrait of two psychologists. Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Gibson, E. J., & Bergman, R. (1954). The effect of training on absolute estimation of distance over ground. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 48, 473–482.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E. J., & Pick, A. D. (2000). An ecological approach to perceptual learning and development. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E. J., Riccio, G., Schmuckler, M. A., Stoffregen, T. A., Rosenberg, D., & Taormina, J. (1987). Detection of the traversability of surfaces by crawling and walking infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 13, 533–544.Google ScholarPubMed
Gibson, E. J., & Walk, R. D. (1960). The “visual cliff”. Scientific American, 202, 64–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, D. M., & Swets, J. A. (1966). Signal detection theory and psychophysics. Wiley.Google Scholar
Held, R., Birch, E., & Gwiazda, J. (1980). Stereoacuity of human infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 77, 5572–5574.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Held, R., & Hein, A. (1963). Movement-produced stimulation in the development of visually guided behavior. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 56, 872–876.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hunter, M. A., & Ames, E. W. (1988). A multifactor model of infant preferences for novel and familiar stimuli. In Rovee-Collier, C., & Lipsitt, L. P. (Eds.), Advances in infancy research (Vol. 5, pp. 69–95). Ablex Publishing.Google Scholar
Johnson, S. P., Slemmer, J. A., & Amso, D. (2004). Where infants look determines how they see: Eye movements and object perception performance in 3-month-olds. Infancy, 6, 185–201.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Karasik, L. B., Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., & Adolph, K. E. (2016). Decisions at the brink: Locomotor experience affects infants’ use of social information on an adjustable drop-off. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 797.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kellman, P. J., & Spelke, E. S. (1983). Perception of partly occluded objects in infancy. Cognitive Psychology, 15, 483–524.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kretch, K. S., & Adolph, K. E. (2017). The organization of exploratory behaviors in infant locomotor planning. Developmental Science, 20, e12421.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Scherer, K. R., Zentner, M. R., & Stern, D. (2004). Beyond surprise: The puzzle of infants’ expressive reactions to expectancy violation. Emotion, 4, 389–402.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schmuckler, M. A., & Gibson, E. J. (1989). The effect of imposed optical flow on guided locomotion in young walkers. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 7, 193–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmuckler, M. A., & Li, N. S. (1998). Looming responses to obstacles and apertures: The role of accretion and deletion of background texture. Psychological Science, 9, 49–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spelke, E. S. (1976). Infants’ intermodal perception of events. Cognitive Psychology, 8, 553–560.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spelke, E. S. (1979). Perceiving bimodally specified events in infancy. Developmental Psychology, 15, 626–636.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spelke, E. S. (2022). What babies know: Core knowledge and composition (Vol. 1). Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., Adolph, K. E., Lobo, S. A., Karasik, L. B., Dimitropoulou, K. A., & Ishak, S. (2008). When infants take mothers’ advice: 18-month-olds integrate perceptual and social information to guide motor action. Developmental Psychology, 44, 734–746.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Teller, D. Y. (1979). The forced-choice preferential looking procedure: A psychophysical technique for use with human infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 2, 135–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walk, R. D., & Gibson, E. J. (1961). A comparative and analytical study of visual depth perception. Psychological Monographs, 75(15, Whole No. 519), 1–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar