Exam Tip
Baillargeon’s theory is another useful theory to compare and contrast with Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
Infant knowledge & reasoning of the physical world
- Baillargeon’s theory of infant knowledge and the physical world is a nativist explanation of early infant abilities
- Baillargeon assumed that infants have an inbuilt sense of object permanence, unlike Piaget, who thought that infants acquire object permanence around the age of eight months
- Baillargeon believed that infants are born with a ready-made sense of the physical world and that this does not have to be constructed using the ‘building blocks’ of experience
- This innate understanding of the physical world was termed the ‘physical reasoning system’ by Baillargeon (2012)
- Baillargeon argued that infants are born with a sense of object persistence i.e. that an object still exists even when it is occluded (blocked) by another object and so she devised a series of experiments to test this theory (see below)
Baillargeon used ‘impossible events’ to test object persistence in young babies