One way babies learn about the world is through their sense of touch. When a baby grasps an object, they learn something about it's size and shape, also it's hardness and texture. As adults, we treat different materials differently. We might pick up and squeeze a rubber ducky, but we're not likely to pick up and squeeze a bunch of water sitting in a bowl. Instead, we might dip our fingers in the water, or splash it with an open palm.
In our lab, we're interested in whether young babies think about the world in the same way that adults do. In this project, we ask whether babies treat different materials differently, and if so, whether the distinct ways in which they treat each material is similar to how adults treat them.
What's the first thing you might do with this? Squeeze it? Pick it up? Bang it on the table?
How about these... do you grasp them one at a time, or a whole bunch at once? Do you bang them together?
Puffs are squeezable, would you grasp several and squeeze? Or maybe sort them by color?
This material looks like regular sand, but is moldable like dough or putty. Would you be likely to squeeze it? Or does it's sand-like appearance lead you to treat it otherwise?
Sand is hard to pick up, and certainly not graspable like solid materials. Would you spread it? Sweep it? Smear it?
Water is a highly familiar substance, but like sand, is not graspable like solid materials. How would you treat it? Would you dip your fingers, or splash?
Very few studies have been done exploring how babies use their hands to explore the material world. The first question we wanted to ask, was whether babies differentiate at all between different kinds of material substances. In an ongoing study, we allow babies to touch and interact with the 6 materials pictured above (in a random order). Each material is poured onto the highchair tray, (except for the duck) and the baby has 30 seconds to play with it as they please.
Preliminary findings suggest that babies DO differentiate between these materials, using a distinct set of behaviors to interact with each one.
To determine whether babies' unique interaction styles are adult-like, we are comparing the most frequent infant behaviors to the most frequent behaviors that adults use when interacting with these substances.
Based on a limited amount of adult pilot data, it appears that the ways in which babies interacted with each material are basically the same ways that adults interact with those materials!
Because babies have not had little or no experience with most of these materials (with the exception of water), the fact that they already differentiate them by 5 months of age suggests that the knowledge of how to interact with a given material may be innate, or it may be based on perceptual information the baby gathers when presented with the material (e.g., water pours smoothly out onto the tray, while the gems are chunky, clunky, and loud when poured onto the tray.) Infant and adult perceptual systems may see the same affordances (e.g., that water affords splashing, while moldable sand does not, but affords squeezing instead), leading them to use the same behaviors for a given substance.
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