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While the popular belief may be that babies\u2019 brains are blank slates, new research suggests that infants are born with some innate knowledge of their physical worlds, and they use that knowledge to learn,\u00a0according to a paper published in the journal Science.<\/p>\n
The researchers say their work builds on previous studies that have shown that very young babies are born with knowledge such as depth perception and the ability to tell whether or not an object is solid. This new study builds on this \u201ccore knowledge\u201d theory by showing that babies notice unexpected situations in their physical world, and use that knowledge to learn.<\/p>\n
Scientists have discovered that babies will spend much more time looking at things that adults find surprising or unexpected \u2014 when a ball appears to pass through a wall rather than bumping into it, for example \u2014 than at things that are not. For the last 30 years or so, scientists have used measurements of babies\u2019 gazes to study everything from their ability to understand\u00a0object permanence to differentiate sets of numbers.<\/p>\n
The authors of the new study wanted to understand what the purpose of that behavior might be.<\/b>\u00a0Johns Hopkins University psychology doctoral student Aimee Stahl and psychology professor Lisa Feigenson<\/a> designed a series of experiments in which they showed surprising and unsurprising events to 11-month-old babies. The events would either challenge or confirm what they know about physical objects. In the \u201csurprise\u201d group, for example, babies were shown a rolling ball that appeared to pass through a wall; the \u201cunsurprising\u201d group saw the ball stop rolling when it hit a wall.<\/p>\n Not only did the babies spent significantly more time watching the \u201csurprise\u201d event, but the \u201csurprised\u201d babies then seemed better able to learn about the ball. The psychologists tested this by \u201cteaching\u201d both groups of babies new information about the object. They moved the ball up and down, causing a squeaking noise. Later, when both groups of babies heard the squeaking noise while they were shown the ball along with a new object, a toy car, only the babies who had seen the surprising event gazed at the ball, implying they knew where the sound came from.<\/p>\n Researchers wanted to know more about how the babies learned about objects that surprised them, so they ran another experiment. One group of babies saw the same scenario as before \u2014 either a ball passing through a wall or a ball stopped by a wall. A second group saw a different set of surprising and unsurprising events \u2014 either a ball that appeared to float in the air, or a ball that rested on a box that supported it. Both groups were then given the ball and a toy car to play with. While the babies who hadn\u2019t been surprised played with both objects equally, the \u201csurprised\u201d babies played with the ball for far longer.<\/p>\n They also seemed to be trying, on their own, to figure out the \u201csurprising” event they witnessed. Babies who saw the ball pass through the wall banged the ball repeatedly, as if to test whether it was solid. Babies who saw the ball suspended in mid-air dropped it, as if to figure out whether it would float.<\/p>\n \u201cTogether, our work suggests that when infants witness an object defy their expectations, they learn about that object better, explore it more, and spontaneously test relevant hypotheses about the object\u2019s behavior,\u201d Stahl, the lead author of the study, said in a call with reporters on Wednesday.<\/p>\n The findings, the researchers say, build on previous results that have showed that babies have \u201csophisticated knowledge,\u201d and that they take surprising events as \u201cspecial opportunities to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n In a famous 1959 experiment, Cornell University psychologists Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk<\/a>\u00a0showed that babies as young as 6 months old stop crawling when they reach what appears to be the edge of a cliff reflected in a mirror, showing that they had depth perception. Cognitive psychologists\u00a0such as Harvard University\u2019s Elizabeth Spelke<\/a>\u00a0assert that babies as young as two months old seem to know that one solid object can\u2019t pass through another. They\u2019ve even\u00a0demonstrated that newborn baby chicks\u00a0and\u00a0chimpanzees have some of these abilities<\/a>.<\/p>\n