Critical Thinking Questions
- The major theme throughout this chapter was nature and nurture. Consider the following research findings discussed in the chapter: infants' preference for consonance (versus dissonance) in music, their preference for faces that adults consider attractive, and their ability to represent the existence and even the height of an occluded object. To what extent do you think these preferences and abilities rest on innate factors, and to what extent might they be the result of experience?
- As you have seen from this chapter, researchers have learned a substantial amount about infants in the recent past. Were you surprised at some of what has been learned? Describe to a friend something from each of the main sections of the chapter that you would never have suspected an infant could do or would know. Similarly, tell your friend a few things that you were surprised to learn infants do not know or that they fail to do.
- Studying infants' perceptual and cognitive abilities is especially tricky given their limited abilities to respond in a study—they can't respond verbally or even with a reliable reach or point. Consider some of the methods described in this chapter (preferential looking, conditioning, habituation, violation of expectation, imitation, and so on). Can you match each method up with a study described in the chapter? What kinds of questions are best suited to each method?
- Explain why researchers did the following things, each of which seems somewhat odd if one does not know the rationale behind it. What hypotheses were they trying to test?
- (a) Suspended infants in water up to their waists
- (b) Put a patch over one eye and showed infants a misshapen window
- (c) “Hid” a toy under a transparent container
- (d) Pretended to be unable to pull the end off a dumbbell