University of Rochester, Rochester, New York
Richard N. Aslin and Jacques Mehler

Awarded $100,000 over two years in support of a task force on infant looking methods used to assess cognitive development.

One of the greatest challenges for mind-brain science is to design and execute experiments that allow scientists to infer mental processes from observed changes in subjects’ behavior. Daniel Povinelli took up this challenge in his James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship research. Povinelli’s work focuses on developing careful behavioral experiments that allow us to infer how similar or dissimilar chimpanzees’ mental life is from that of human infants. Whereas some developmental scientists want to attribute very high level explanations to the animal behavior experiments, Povinelli shows that attributing sophisticated mental functions to chimpanzees is not consistent with the data.

The work of Richard Aslin at the University of Rochester and Jacques Mehler at I.S.S.A. in Trieste, Italy, takes up this same challenge, but focuses on experimental methods used to assess human infant cognition. Developmental scientists have known for decades that infants are able to control their eye movements, long before they can control motor movements, like reaching. Thus, developmental scientists exploit experimental methods that rely on infants’ ability to control their gaze to assess what infants notice, perceive, and in some cases, what they know.

Some uses of this experimental method that are more controversial. In some laboratories, infants are shown what the scientists call an “impossible event.” For example, one solid object might appear to move through another, or one object might appear to become two objects. In some of these experiments, children appear to look at the “impossible event” longer than at a possible event. Some developmental psychologists give high-level explanations to these behaviors, claiming that longer looking times at impossible events indicate that infants have knowledge of how the physical world works, even in the absence of experience with physical objects. Other scientists assign lower-level explanations.

A necessary step in settling these controversies is to assure that scientists use standardized methods in looking time experiments. So there are consistent interpretations of the observed behaviors.