Using a novel eye-tracking paradigm, we assessed the development of 2- to 6-year-old children’s intuitions about the physical support of symmetrical and asymmetrical objects in two experiments (Experiment 1: N = 98; Experiment 2: N = 288). Children were presented with video sequences demonstrating how two identical blocks were lowered onto a platform before being released simultaneously. In the critical test trials, both blocks remained in place although only one of them was sufficiently supported. As expected, children tended to look longer at the block, which should have fallen. Taken together, the results indicate that even 2-year-old children are sensitive to the amount of contact between symmetrical blocks and a supporting platform and even anticipate which block is going to fall. Nonetheless, we found a considerable improvement with age in this respect. Two-year-olds did not consider an object’s weight distribution reliably when assessing its stability and even older preschoolers performed much more poorly with asymmetrical than symmetrical blocks. We conclude that intuitions about support are still weak and limited in toddlers and that they improve considerably during early childhood.
AmselE.GoodmanG.SavoieD.ClarkM. (1996). The development of reasoning about causal and non causal influences on levers. Child Development, 67, 1624–1646. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1996.tb01818.x
2.
AndersonN. H. (1981). Foundation of information integration theory. New York, NY: Academic Press.
3.
AndrewsG.HalfordG. S.MurphyK.KnoxK. (2009). Integration of weight and distance information in young children: The role of relational complexity. Cognitive Development, 24, 49–60. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2008.07.005
4.
BaillargeonR. (1995). A model of physical reasoning in infancy. In Rovee-CollierC.LipsittL. P. (Eds.), Advances in infancy research (Vol. 9, pp. 305–371). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
5.
BaillargeonR. (1996). Infants’ understanding of the physical world. In SabourinM.CraikF.RobertM. (Eds.), Advances in psychological science (Vol. 2, pp. 503–529). London, England: Psychology Press.
6.
BaillargeonR. (1999). Young infants’ expectations about hidden objects: A reply to three challenges. Developmental Science, 2, 115–163. doi:10.1111/1467-7687.00061
7.
BaillargeonR. (2002). The acquisition of physical knowledge in infancy: A summary in eight lessons. In GoswamiU. (Ed.), Handbook of childhood cognitive development (pp. 47–83). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470996652.ch3
8.
BaillargeonR. (2004). Infants’ reasoning about hidden objects: Evidence for event-general and event-specific expectations. Developmental Science, 7, 391–424. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2004.00357.x
9.
BaillargeonR.CareyS. (2012). Core cognition and beyond: The acquisition of physical and numerical knowledge. In PauenS.BornsteinM. (Eds.), Early childhood development and later outcome (pp. 33–65). London, England: Cambridge University Press.
10.
BaillargeonR.LiJ.NgW.YuanS. (2009). An account of infants’ physical reasoning. In WoodwardA.NeedhamA. (Eds.), Learning and the infant mind (pp. 66–116). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
11.
BaillargeonR.NeedhamA.DeVosJ. (1992). The development of young infants’ intuitions about support. Early Development and Parenting, 1, 69–78. doi:10.1002/edp.2430010203
12.
BaillargeonR.ScottR. M.HeZ. (2010). False-belief understanding in infants. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 110–118.
13.
BaillargeonR.StavansM.WuD.GertnerY.SetohP.KittredgeA. K.BernardA. (2012). Object individuation and physical reasoning in infancy: An integrative account. Language Learning and Development, 8, 4–46.
14.
BogartzR. S.ShinskeyJ. L.SpeakerC. J. (1997). Interpreting infant looking: The event set x event set design. Developmental Psychology, 33, 408–422. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.33.3.408
15.
BonawitzE. B.van SchijndelT. J.FrielD.SchulzL. (2012). Children balance theories and evidence in exploration, explanation, and learning. Cognitive Psychology, 64, 215–234.
16.
CareyS. (2009). The origin of concepts. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
17.
CashonC. H.HaO.AllenC. L.BarnaA. C. (2013). A U-Shaped relation between sitting ability and upright face processing in infants. Child Development, 84, 802–809. doi:10.1111/cdev.12024
18.
CheungC. N.WongW. C. (2011). Understanding conceptual development along the implicit–explicit dimension: Looking through the lens of the representational redescription model. Child Development, 82, 2037–2052. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01657.x
19.
DanN.OmoriT.TomiyasuY. (2000). Development of infants’ intuitions about support relations: Sensitivity to stability. Developmental Science, 3, 171–180. doi:10.1111/1467-7687.00110
20.
DümmlerT.SchöberlP.SchwarzerG. (2008). Development of visual center of mass localization for grasp point selection. Cognitive Development, 23, 370–384. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2008.06.002
21.
GangerJ.BrentM. R. (2004). Reexamining the vocabulary spurt. Developmental Psychology, 40, 621–632. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.40.4.621
22.
HaithM. (1998). Who put the cog in infant cognition? Is rich interpretation too costly?Infant Behavior and Development, 21, 167–179. doi:10.1016/S0163-6383(98)90001-7
23.
HalfordG. S.AndrewsG.DaltonC.BoagC.ZielinskiT. (2002). Young children’s performance on the balance scale: The influence of relational complexity. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 81, 417–445. doi:10.1006/jecp.2002.2665
24.
HesposS. J.BaillargeonR. (2008). Young infants’ actions reveal their developing knowledge of support variables: Converging evidence for violation of expectation findings. Cognition, 107, 304–316. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.07.009
25.
HuettelS. A.NeedhamA. (2000). Effects of balance relations between objects on infant’s object segregation. Developmental Science, 3, 415–427. doi:10.1111/1467-7687.00136
26.
InhelderB.PiagetJ. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence: An essay on the construction of formal operational structures (Vol. 22). London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1955)
27.
KaganJ. (2008). In defense of qualitative changes in development. Child Development, 79, 1606–1624. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2008.01211.x
28.
Karmiloff-SmithA. (1992). Beyond modularity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
29.
Karmiloff-SmithA.InhelderB. (1974). If you want to get ahead, get a theory. Cognition, 3, 195–212. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(74)90008-0
30.
KeenR. (2003). Representation of objects and events: Why do infants look so smart and toddlers look so dumb?Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 79–83. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.01234
31.
KristH. (2010). Development of intuitions about support beyond infancy. Developmental Psychology, 46, 266–278. doi:10.1037/a0018040
32.
KristH. (2013). Development of intuitive statics: Preschoolers’ difficulties judging the stability of asymmetrically-shaped objects are not due to extraneous task demands. Zeitschrift für Entwicklungspsychologie und Pädagogische Psychologie, 45, 27–33. doi:10.1026/0049-8637/a000078
33.
KristH.HorzH.SchönfeldT. (2005). Children’s block balancing revisited: No evidence for representational redescription. Swiss Journal of Psychology, 64, 183–193. doi:10.1024/1421-0185.64.3.183
34.
KristH.StallbaumF. (2014, July3-5). Discontinuity in early cognitive development: The case of physical reasoning about support. Poster presented at the XIX Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS), Berlin, Germany.
35.
McClellandJ. L. (1995). A connectionist perspective on knowledge and development. In SimonT.HalfordG. (Eds.), Developing cognitive competence: New approaches to process modeling (pp. 157–204). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
36.
McNeilN. M. (2007). U-shaped development in math: 7-year-olds outperform 9-year-olds on equivalence problems. Developmental Psychology, 43, 687–695. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.43.3.687
37.
PauenS.TräubleB. (2009). How 7-month-olds interpret ambiguous motion events: Category-based reasoning in infancy. Cognitive Psychology, 59, 275–295. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2009.06.001
38.
PauenS.WilkeningF. (1997). Children’s analogical reasoning about natural phenomena. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 67, 90–11. doi:10.1006/jecp.1997.2394
39.
PineK.MesserD. (1999). What children do and what children know: Looking beyond success using Karmiloff-Smith’s RR framework. New Ideas in Psychology, 17, 17–30. doi:10.1016/S0732-118X(98)00014-2
40.
PineK.MesserD. (2003). The development of representations as children learn about balancing. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 21, 285–302. doi:10.1348/026151003765264093
41.
SchraufC.CallJ.PauenS. (2011). The effect of plausible versus implausible balance scale feedback on the expectancies of 3-to 4-year-old children. Journal of Cognition and Development, 12, 518–536. doi:10.1080/15248372.2011.571647
42.
ScottR.HeZ.BaillargeonR.CumminsD. (2012). False-belief understanding in 2.5-year-olds: Evidence from two novel verbal spontaneous-response tasks. Developmental Science, 15, 181–193. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01103.x
43.
ShinskeyJ. L. (2002). Infants’ object search: Effects of variable object visibility under constant means-end demands. Journal of Cognition and Development, 3, 119–142. doi:10.1207/S15327647JCD0302-1
44.
SieglerR. S. (1976). Three aspects of cognitive development. Cognitive Psychology, 8, 481–520. doi:10.1016/0010-0285(76)90016-5
45.
SieglerR. S. (1978). The origins of scientific reasoning. In SieglerR. S. (Ed.), Children’s thinking: What develops? (pp. 109–149). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
46.
SieglerR. S. (1981). Developmental sequences within and between concepts. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 46, 1–84. doi:10.2307/1165995
47.
SouthgateV.SenjuA.CsibraG. (2007). Action anticipation through attribution of false belief by 2-year-olds. Psychological Science, 18, 587–592. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01944.x
48.
SpelkeE. S. (1991). Physical knowledge in infancy: Reflections on Piaget’s theory. In CareyS.GelmanR. (Eds.), The epigenesis of mind: Essays on biology and cognition (pp. 133–169). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
SurberC. F.GzeshS. M. (1984). Reversible operations in the balance scale task. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 38, 254–274. doi:10.1016/0022-0965(84)90125-5
52.
ThelenE.SmithL. B. (1994). A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
53.
WangS.ZhangY.BaillargeonR. (2016). Young infants view physically possible support events as unexpected: New evidence for rule learning. Cognition, 157, 100–105. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.08.021
54.
WerkerJ. F.TeesR. C. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior & Development, 7, 49–63. doi:10.1016/S0163-6383(02)00093-0
55.
WilkeningF.AndersonN. H. (1991). Representation and diagnosis of knowledge structures in developmental psychology. In AndersonN. H. (Ed.), Contributions to information integration theory. Vol III: Developmental (pp. 45–80). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
56.
YuanS.BaillargeonR. (2009, April2-4). The development of infants’ reasoning about the support of asymmetrically-shaped objects. Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), Denver, CO.
57.
YuanS.BernardA.EsseilyR.BaillargeonR. (2011, March 31-April 2). 2.5-year-olds’ reasoning about the support of asymmetrically-shaped objects: Continuity from infancy (SRCD). Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal, Canada.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
