CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Critical Analysis

Critical Analysis

Hood BM., Cole-Davis V. & Dias M. (2003). Looking and search measures of object knowledge in preschool children. Developmental Psychology, 39, 61-70.

What was the aim of this study? How did it extend previous studies in this area?

The main aim of this study was to determine whether children are able to represent absent objects using search procedures or whether they rely simply on what is in sight at the moment using observation. The study was conducted on children aged 2½ years and 3 years to establish whether tasks requiring search for hidden objects involve cognitive development, since Piaget made it a critical feature of testing infants' representation of out-of-sight objects (Harris, pp. 2008). While it is easy to replicate Piaget's finding that infants will not search for a desired object that has disappeared under a cloth, it has been hard to interpret this puzzling behaviour.

Spelke et al (1992) performed a looking time study in continuity on infants The results showed that even children as young as 4-months-old were able to appreciate that a ball cannot go through a solid wall. Hood et al (2003) expanded this study by carrying out a similar observation task on preschoolers aged 2½-years-old and 3-years-old.

Hypothesis

The spatiotemporal cue was more basic and would be used earlier in development than the more complex cue of the barrier.

The key to prediction for the 2-year-old is having the elements visually available within the spatial array.

What were the main findings of this study?

Research shows that children aged 2½ years find it much more difficult to use visually obvious cues, such as a barrier that blocks a moving object's path. A key problem for younger children appears to be difficulty in representing a spatial array involving events with multiple elements. The findings indicate that children visually discriminate violations of solidity but that this sensitivity is not associated with successful search performance.

The observation (looking) task showed that both groups of children looked longer at impossible outcomes than possible ones. However, the younger group of children had a tendency to look longer on their first look. For the duration of the 10 second observation task, 12 children constantly looked. Only 1 child out of the 12 children looked continuously for the 10 second period on the impossible task. Out of the 12 children, 3 were 2½-year-olds and 9 were 3-year-olds.

The findings of Hood et al. (2003) pointed to a clear dissociation between looking and searching in children's understanding of a hidden object's location.

The design problem concerned the fact that Hood et al. (2003) always rolled the object from the same direction.

The results discussed thus far seem to suggest that toddlers' capacity for object representation differs radically from that of adults and older children. Surely no adult (and very few 3-year-olds!) would fail to use the barrier wall to successfully locate the ball in the door task. Previous research suggests however, that even adults can at times be “blind” to the positions of objects that occlude ones they are attempting ...