Her Campus Mizzou: What are your recent discoveries from the Developmental Cognition Lab?
Kristy vanMarle: I reviewed literature about babies and infants from Susan Hespos at Northwestern University. The objective is to look at infants and try to better understand their early knowledge about objects and to see how they determine things to be objects. Something people don’t know is that babies have surprisingly sophisticated knowledge about how things work. They have expectations. Even as young as they are, they still have ideas and laws they believe objects must follow. As a result when objects don’t respond to the laws they think about, they tend to stare longer at the objects. This was discovered by the work we did in the lab. Our objective was to put pieces together and see the bigger picture.
HCM: What were the results of your research and experiments?
KvM: Our main finding was that babies are in fact better at quantifying objects rather than substances. We confirmed that babies are able to understand substances in addition to objects. However babies are much worse at reasoning about substances because it is harder for them to see how much or determine the quantity of a substance rather than just being able to detect a solid object. We used sand as a substance, and babies had a hard time realizing how much sand there was. They weren’t very sensitive to the number of piles of sand that was present. Babies can’t count things that aren’t objects. We would put the sand on a stage and then make it disappear and measure how long babies stare at the stage. We were able to see that babies have a very specialized way of thinking about objects. With objects, babies were surprised when they would disappear because they have expectations about them.
HCM: How did you get participants for the experiments?
KvM: We asked people from Columbia to allow us to borrow their babies! We provided them with information about our research, and we had several volunteers who were willing to help. Students, mostly undergrads, help conduct the research on a volunteer basis as well. Sometimes students are able to receive course credit for helping. It usually takes three to four students to test a baby. The students come into the testing lab, and each session takes approximately 30 minutes. Students time and measure how long the babies look at different objects.
HCM: What has happened with your research findings, and what will you do next?
KvM: The findings were published in a journal called WIREs. This is a peer-review journal. I am going to continue working on finding more evidence that babies have specialized processes for objects. I am going to do more tests to see if it is possible to get babies and infants to perceive substances in the same way they see objects.
HCM: What is your favorite part about conducting research and performing these experiments?
KvM: My favorite part is being able to show and see that there is a lot more going on in a baby’s head than people think. Babies have knowledge early on about basic things about our world that helps them reason effectively. They’re so fun to work with! It is challenging doing infant research because babies can’t read instructions or follow directions like adults can. It is harder to collect data, so we have to be clever with the designs of the experiments. I enjoy the challenge because the results are worth it! It was very entertaining putting on a magic show with the sand and being able to watch the infants’ reactions.