Skip to main content
Social Sci LibreTexts

8.3: How is Infant and Toddler Cognition Studied?

  • Page ID
    140004
    • Todd LaMarr
    \( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \) \( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)\(\newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\) \( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\) \( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \(\newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\) \( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\) \( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)\(\newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}\)

    Studying Cognition

    Infants’ emerging understanding of the physical and social world is commonly investigated by using violation-of-expectation experiments. In violation-of-expectation experiments, unexpected events that violate physical or social rules lead to different responses in infants’ gaze behavior (Baillargeon, 2004), pupil dilation (Jackson & Sirois, 2009), and brain responses (Köster, Langeloh, & Hoehl, 2019). For example, infants detect impossible physical events, such as a ball rolling through a wall (Spelke et al., 1992), changes in numbers, such as when the number of toys changes (Simon, Hespos, & Rochat, 1995), or irrational human actions, such as a pretzel that is put toward the ear instead of the mouth (Reid et al., 2009). Interesting research on the development of moral cognition used the violation-of-expectation paradigm and a cookie scenario, presented in Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\), to study the possibility that young infants might expect resources to be divided equally between similar recipients (Dawkins, Sloane & Baillargeon, 2019). Infants as young as four months of age expected an experimenter to divide two cookies equally between two similar animated puppets, and they detected a violation (measured by longer looking time) when the researcher divided them unequally instead. [1] [2]

    In the example of an equal event of studying moral development a researcher gives both participants a cookie. In an example of an unequal event a researcher gives one participant both cookies and observes reactions.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Example of how an experiment on moral cognition used violation-of-expectation. ([3])

    A second common method to study cognition in infants and toddlers is called habituation. Many prominent studies of infant cognition over the past two decades have relied on the fact that infants habituate to repeated stimuli – i.e. that their looking times tend to decline upon repeated stimulus presentation (Aslin, 2007; Oakes, 2010). Habituation is one of the earliest cognitive processes to emerge in development (Colombo & Mitchell, 2009) and reflects a basic form of learning: once a stimulus is fully encoded in the mind, the infant habituates to it and demonstrates decreased attention to the stimulus. Researchers have found that the duration of time to habituate in infancy accounts for up to 30 percent of the variance in cognitive ability at older ages (Bornstein & Sigman, 1986; Colombo, 1993; Miller et al., 1980). This indicates that habituation provides important insight into early cognition as it relates to the development of more complex cognitive abilities later in childhood. [4]

    To illustrate how habituation is used to research cognition, one study explored the visual habituation of objects in hearing and deaf non-signing infants and toddlers (Monroy et al., 2019). The children were shown one of the objects in Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\) until they habituated to it (three consecutive trials in which the mean looking time to the stimulus was less than or equal to 50% of the mean looking time during the first three habituation trials). After habituation, the infant was then presented with randomized trials containing both a new object (not shown in the habituation phase) and the familiar object (shown in the habituation phase). Findings revealed that deaf infants were slower to habituate to and demonstrated a lower look-away rate than hearing infants. Evidence from prior studies suggests that the ‘look-away’ rate—brief eye gaze shifts away from the target stimulus during habituation—reflects processing efficiency and attentional control (Bahrick et al., 2016). One explanation for these results is that deaf infants’ cognitive development may be protracted because of delayed language development (these deaf infants already had or were waiting to receive a cochlear implant and all of them had limited access to a fully-accessible language, like sign language). [4]

    two object's are shown. Object A is a conglomeration of digital shapes creating no discernable figure. Object B has a triangle, rectangle and star stacked horizontally.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Examples of objects used in an infant habituation experiment. ([5])

    [1] Köster et al., (2020). Making sense of the world: infant learning from a predictive processing perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(3), 562-571. CC by 4.0

    [2] ​​Buyukozer et al., (2019). Do infants in the first year of life expect equal resource allocations? Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 116. CC by 4.0

    [3] Image from Buyukozer et al., (2019). Do infants in the first year of life expect equal resource allocations? Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 116. CC by 4.0

    [4] Monroy et al., (2019). Visual habituation in deaf and hearing infants. PloS One, 14(2), e0209265. CC by 4.0

    [5] Image from Monroy et al., (2019). Visual habituation in deaf and hearing infants. PloS One, 14(2), e0209265. CC by 4.0


    This page titled 8.3: How is Infant and Toddler Cognition Studied? is shared under a mixed 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Todd LaMarr.