Great article. The author, Alison Gopnik, also has two very interesting books, The Scientist in the Crib and The Philosopher in the Crib.
She's right about our education system. As John Taylor Gotti explains, it was designed in the nineteenth century to produce factory workers who would not think for themselves, but just take orders. But what we need today and tomorrow is people who will learn on their own initiative and figure out intelligent solutions (like open source software developers), and so we need an educational system that will encourage that sort of behavior. What Gopnik is saying that this is something natural for children, if we put them in the right circumstances.
Regarding physics intuition, it reminds me this short video clip by Richard Feynman on how his father "taught" him that deeper observation reveals Physics intuition of a more basic concept of "inertia".
>> The babies seemed to figure out that when the experimenter’s arms were wrapped up, she couldn’t use her hands, and that must have been why she had used her head instead. So when it was the babies’ turn they took the easy route and tapped the box with their hands.
Or maybe the babies had just completely forgot about the experimenter and his wrapped-up hands and didn't even "tap" the box but more like "bumped into" it hands-first. The difference between a "tap with intent" and a "bump without intent" or even a "tap without specific intent other than basic curiosity" is probably not even possible to measure.
That's why I find it very hard to trust experiments like this: they're supposed to tell us something about the way babies think but we can't actually check we got the right end of the stick. They're babies, so we can't just ask them. If we asked adults to do the same thing we wouldn't learn anything new either. So what's the point?
The result is that researchers get into this elaborate dance with their subjects trying to set things up so there's no plausible alternative explanation than what the research is trying to show- but a) there always is and b) it's pretty damn annoying to what lengths the research goes to avoid admitting (a).
Also, once I find one such transgression in an article I then find it very hard to read through with any shred of trust to the writer.
Actually, they have a control in place in the study itself and they could additionally have compared against the results from the 1988 study where all the experimenters hands were free.
Sometimes the experimenter had their hands free and other times they did not. When the experimenter had their hands free and tapped the box with their forehead, the babies imitated the head action over 60% of the time. When the experimenter had their hands bound, the babies imitated the head action only 20% of the time.
To me that's a big enough difference that the babies didn't just accidentally tap without specific intent.
>> Actual write-up in Nature (which was linked to in the article):
Yeah, about that:
79% of them chose not to imitate here because their own hands were free, presumably concluding that the head action was the most rational.
Whether they re-enacted the head action or not, all infants who watched the adult perform under both conditions still used the hand action.
See what I mean? Who knows _why_ 79% of babies chose to imitate the researcher? The research assumes it was "because their own hands were free" - but isn't that what it's trying to prove in the first place? And where does that conclusion, about rationality, comes from? Certainly not something that the babies indicated, but rather the researchers' interpretation of the actions of the babies. This is... it's kind of like anthropomorphising animals. There's absolutely no reson to assume that babies where behaving rationally, or irrationally. They could just be moving completely at random, but the researchers go ahead and assign motives to them and "rationality" as well. What the hell!
And like the second paragraph says, all infants used their hands _anyway_. At that point it's obvious that the head action is just a random thing that some babies do anyway. Because if they know they can turn the light on with their hands, why would they use their heads _also_? If they don't know they can turn the light on with their hands, then how can they know they can turn it on with their heads? This just doesn't make any sense.
It feels like you are shifting the goalposts here, but I potentially misunderstand your original objections.
In your first comment, you say that "maybe the babies had just completely forgot about the experimenter and his wrapped-up hands and didn't even "tap" the box but more like "bumped into" it hands-first". That is, we can't judge the intent of the babies and so we can't determine why they use their hands instead of heads.
I agree that we can't ask babies what their intent is and have them verbalise the response, but that is not the same thing as being unable to determine intent. Indeed, asking and listening to a response is just one form of setting up an experiment and evaluating the response. Of course there may be reasons we can't think of, but the scientific method gives us a framework to explore those ideas.
Hypothesis: babies can recognise constraints upon action when observing action. When mimicking this action later, if not under the same constraint, the babies will modify the action in order to achieve the outcome of the action as simply as possible.
The null hypothesis here would be every baby performing the same action regardless of constraints observed.
So, if after seeing the button pusher with hands tied, and at other times without hands tied (using different babies in each case of course), we would expect to see no difference in how the babies pushed the button. If they were simply "bumping into" the button with their hands, they would do so an equivalent number of times in each group of babies. Assuming everything else was controlled for (which we can't know for certain, but is reasonable to assume) then the hypothesis holds.
If the babies were "moving completely at random" we would expect to see completely different outcomes then what were observed.
Your objection about rationality is probably more about scope or context of definition. The researchers seem to be using 'rational' as a shorthand for 'understands constraints and can remove them in order to achieve the desired outcome'.
For example, if the observed uses their head to push the button and their hands are not tied, it is 'rational' to believe that the head must be used to push the button. If the hands are tied, however, it is more 'rational' to believe that the head is being used because the hands are tied - the constraint is recognised.
Finally the second paragraph says "all infants who watched the adult perform under both conditions" not "all infants". That is, there was a group of babies shown both ways to push the button, and those babies chose to use their hands every time and not their heads.
>> It feels like you are shifting the goalposts here, but I potentially
misunderstand your original objections.
I have several objectsions about this and similar studies, so I may sound like
I'm changing the subject, sorry about that. I'm not sure where I did that, but
it's not my intention to shift the goalposts, I feel I'm being consistent.
>> The null hypothesis here would be every baby performing the same action
regardless of constraints observed.
That's just not a valid null hypothesis. Not when you're dealing
with living things, particularly human beings, even if they're babies. There's
absolutely nothing to say what a person, even a baby, will do in a certain
situation. We are not automata, or if we are some sort of automaton we are a
type of automaton that is too complex for us to understand and predict.
In that sense I don't see how there can even be a valid null hypothesis. We
don't even know what to expect in the first place, so what are we comparing some specific observation to?
The idea is that the study has "controls", but note we're not even given the numbers of the subjects the experiment involved. Even the bar chart on the right has percentages rather than numbers- why? Well, because it probably involved a dozen subjects or so. A couple of dozen? Probably not more than that.
We're talking about tiny, tiny numbers here. There's not really enough to seriously talk about "controls". And my intuition is that if the study was done on, say, a few hundred babies, results supporting the researchers' conclusions would dissolve into thin air. But- who knows?
As to the main hypothesis:
>> Hypothesis: babies can recognise constraints upon action when observing
action.
Why is that a valid hypothesis to state in the first place? It's making some
assumptions about the baby's mind, specifically that it's the same kind of
mind, in the same kind of context, as that of the person who stated the
hypothesis. Well- that sort of assumption is something that has to be tested
in the first place. We can't just hand-wave that fundamental question away
with a "duh, it's a human baby so".
Social sciences have a tendency to make gigantic leaps of reasoning like that,
and bridge the gap between observed behaviours with assumptions and common
sense, or other social scientists' theories. There are so many things that is
probably impossible to evern know for sure about our minds, no matter how much
science we throw at them, or at the very least it will takes us generations
upon generations of painstaking research to figure out- yet, a lot of the
people who study minds and behaviour will gladly take them for granted and
publish a paper taking them for granted, then others will cite that paper,
build upon its baseless assumptions and add their own on top. That's not
science- that's turtles all the way down.
>> there was a group of babies shown both ways to push the button, and those
babies chose to use their hands every time and not their heads.
I do think that's what I meant but even so- what does that tell us? Who says that's not what should be expected? We're back to
forming a valid null hypothesis, and I don't see how that is established.
> There's absolutely nothing to say what a person, even a baby, will do in a certain situation.
Perhaps not for a single individual in a single situation, but on average humans are quite predictable, and not the unique little snowflakes you make them out to be. If someone slaps you in the face, odds are you will be angry, frightened, surprised, or some combination thereof. You're probably not going to hug that person and invite them over for dinner. Of course there are 6 billion people on this earth, so there may be someone out there who will start singing when slapped, but statistically that person doesn't exist.
> We are not automata, or if we are some sort of automaton we are a type of automaton that is too complex for us to understand and predict.
Understanding the circumstances, thoughts, and emotional state of others is required for empathy. If humans were truly too complex for other humans to understand and predict, empathy could not exist. And if people were unable to predict others, it would be impossible to troll people on the internet.
> In that sense I don't see how there can even be a valid null hypothesis. We don't even know what to expect in the first place, so what are we comparing some specific observation to?
By that logic there can never by a null hypothesis for any experiment. The world is a big and complex place, and there is pretty strong evidence that randomness plays a big role at the smallest scales that we currently understand. Which direction will this rock go when I drop it? Will it even move at all? Who knows! Through the power of quantum teleportation it could suddenly appear anywhere.
> The idea is that the study has "controls", but note we're not even given the numbers of the subjects the experiment involved.
Why are you worrying about the number of subjects? If human behavior cannot be predicted at all, we wouldn't really expect to see a pattern no matter how many subjects participate in the study, would we?
> Even the bar chart on the right has percentages rather than numbers- why? Well, because it probably involved a dozen subjects or so. A couple of dozen? Probably not more than that.
If you have a couple of dozen subjects, observing something happening less than 20% of the time in one group and more than 60% of the time in the other is actually pretty significant. You don't need hundreds of subjects when the difference is that big. [This page](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v415/n6873/fig_tab/4157...) seems to suggest that one group had 14 participants, and the other 13. I suppose that technically qualifies as "couple of dozen".
> We're talking about tiny, tiny numbers here. There's not really enough to seriously talk about "controls". And my intuition is that if the study was done on, say, a few hundred babies, results supporting the researchers' conclusions would dissolve into thin air. But- who knows?
I'm sure researchers everywhere would absolutely love to have hundreds of people participate in all their studies. But that's expensive. Let's imagine a world where this study was done on 200 babies. People in that world would still complain about this study! Instead of "27 subjects? Surely that is too few to conclude anything!" we would hear "How dare those researchers waste a million dollars to investigate how often babies smash stuff with their head!". Imagine the study was unable to show any result, the outrage would be terrible.
> Why is that a valid hypothesis to state in the first place? It's making some assumptions about the baby's mind, specifically that it's the same kind of mind, in the same kind of context, as that of the person who stated the hypothesis. Well- that sort of assumption is something that has to be tested in the first place.
I fail to see your objection here. The hypothesis would make sense if the subjects were adults. It would also make sense for children. So at what age does it stop making sense? How young does someone have to be before we can no longer make assumptions about their mind? How would we even know without experiments such as the very one you are now criticizing? As someone who used to own a dog I think the hypothesis would even make sense not just for humans but also for some social animals.
> We can't just hand-wave that fundamental question away with a "duh, it's a human baby so".
Well if I had to choose between "the mind of a human baby functions similarly to the mind of a human adult" and "the mind of a human baby is completely alien and nothing like that of a human adult" I think Occam's razor favors the former. Regardless, your approach leads to some type of analysis paralysis: we can't perform a study without a hypothesis, and we don't have enough data to form a hypothesis.
> Social sciences have a tendency to make gigantic leaps of reasoning like that, and bridge the gap between observed behaviours with assumptions and common sense, or other social scientists' theories.
So in that respect it's a lot like the non-social sciences?
> There are so many things that is probably impossible to evern know for sure about our minds, no matter how much science we throw at them, or at the very least it will takes us generations upon generations of painstaking research to figure out-
That seems like a giant leap of reasoning of the same type that you like to criticize the social scientists for. Do you at least have a study that vaguely supports this theory?
> yet, a lot of the people who study minds and behaviour will gladly take them for granted and publish a paper taking them for granted, then others will cite that paper, build upon its baseless assumptions and add their own on top.
That sounds a lot like science works in practice.
> That's not science- that's turtles all the way down.
Well there's only so far you can build on a false theory before you notice that your data doesn't make any sense.
> I do think that's what I meant but even so- what does that tell us? Who says that's not what should be expected? We're back to forming a valid null hypothesis, and I don't see how that is established.
I suspect that is primarily because you're being deliberately obtuse because of your dislike for the social sciences.
>> When the experimenter had their hands free and tapped the box with their forehead, the babies imitated the head action over 60% of the time.
There's an episode in Friends where Phoebe discovers she can change channels on the TV by blinking (if I recall correctly). Every time she blinks, the TV switches channel. Joey is there and he confirms it: whenever Phoebe blinks the TV changes channel. Every single time. Amazing. Then she loses it.
So, I'm not saying you have to be Phoebe to get in that situation, in fact you certainly don't. It's very hard to untangle the mess of causality when you're experimenting, especially if we're talking humans, even infants, who are incredibly, impossibly complex.
In any case all this is completely besides the point: it's impossible to know another person's mind state with accuracy unless you ask them and even then it's really hard to know for sure. So any experiment that purports to prove something about a person's mind state is most probably making a mistake, somewhere- same as papers purporting to show energy from the void and so on.
Dunno. Feynmann comes across as a bit of a twat in that video. I agree with his point but if he wasn't as self-satistfied and sarcastic it would give his words more substance.
After all, he's just bragging that he knows more than someone else. When people do that, even if they're Einstein himself (who never did this sort of thing btw) it's very hard to overlook the fact that how much one knows relates to their claims to access to goods and services and their standing in the social hierarchy.
In other words, if Feynmann's livelihood didn't depend on him being smarter than sociologists I'd give his opinion here more weight.
Which is not to say I haven't read and re-read his piece about "cargo-cult science" nodding along every word. It's just that hearing him voicing the actual thoughts he sounds a bit tone-deaf.
The title is a bit misleading - it's basically about how babies/kids learn by observation and that we should give them more opportunity to observe/experiment rather than tell them how the world works
> In 2002 Gyorgy Gergely, Harold Bekkering and Ildiko Kiraly did a different version of this study. Sometimes the experimenters’ arms were wrapped in a blanket when she tapped her forehead on the box. The babies seemed to figure out that when the experimenter’s arms were wrapped up, she couldn’t use her hands, and that must have been why she had used her head instead. So when it was the babies’ turn they took the easy route and tapped the box with their hands.
> In 2013 David Buttelmann and his colleagues did yet another version. First, the babies heard the experimenter speak the same language they did or a different one. Then the experimenter tapped her head on the box. When she had spoken the same language, the babies were more likely to tap the box with their foreheads; when she spoke a different language they were more likely to use their hands.
> In other words, babies don’t copy mindlessly — they take note of who you are and why you act.
One of the interesting things I learned teaching foreign languages is that people only remember things that they understand. That makes intuitive sense, but what I found most interesting is that if someone doesn't understand something, they will often forget that it ever happened.
For example, I once asked my students to bring in their textbook for the next class. I was speaking English (foreign language for the students). Not one student in the 30 brought their textbook the next day. The weird thing is that not one of the students even remembered me saying something that they didn't understand. I've done a seminar where I demonstrate this effect. I say something in Japanese to an English speaking audience. I even make a remark about it. 20 minutes later I ask if anyone remembers me saying something in Japanese. Most people do not. Even after only 20 minutes people completely filter out things that don't make sense to them. When I saw this happening, I immediately found some scientific papers describing the effect. Unfortunately I seem to have lost all my notes so I don't have links handy any more :-(
So, without knowing more, my guess is that the babies get confused with the foreign language and subsequently forget the whole episode.
BTW, knowing this dramatically improved my teaching. If you realise that students who don't understand something in class will actually forget the entire class, you realise how important it is to probe understanding for every person in the class.
And just to get a plug in because people often complain about the quality of education that their children get. I only taught for 5 years, but if there was one thing that I would concentrate on to improve education it's to reduce class sizes. I had classes of 43 (!) most of the time I was teaching. I had fifty minute classes. You can do the math to see how much time I had to help each student individually. In my last year, I restructured my classes reducing my "instruction" time (where I explain things) to 5 minutes a class. I spent the rest of the class probing and evaluating comprehension. Test scores improved dramatically across the board.
I don't mean to be flip, but this is obvious to anyone that has kid(s). Watching them observe and test and learn (and giving them the space to do so) is one of the great joys of my life.
That said, I also see how once children reach a certain age, some parents to become obsessed with the speed of learning, and try to introduce instructed learning with the hope it will work faster, better, and teach them to read faster, etc.
This is a good article that gently encourages allowing children continued space to learn through observation and experimentation with their environment and surroundings. There is a place for instructed learning, but it is not the only way of learning, and for younger children at least, definitely not the most important.
Human (and any other) brain has been shaped by evolutionary forces according to constrains and features of the shared environment (gravitation, light, sound, day/night changes, climate, etc) and has evolved machinery to pick up any language from the shared social environment. So-called hard-wired "knowledge" is just a structure of neurons in specialized areas of the brain, shaped by evolution (selection on random mutations) which reflects the environment.
Ther time scale of evlolution is a few orders of magnitude longer than learning process. So perhaps we are not talking about "hard-wired knowldedge but "physics intuition" in the context of how babies response to those "artificial" magic tricks.
> In one recent experiment, for example, Aimee E. Stahl and Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins showed 11-month-old babies a sort of magic trick. Either a ball appeared to pass through a solid wall, or a toy car appeared to roll off the end of a shelf and remain suspended in thin air. The babies apparently knew enough about everyday physics to be surprised by these strange events and paid a lot of attention to them.
That position is known as the blank slate and is no longer taken seriously among scientists. Language is an instinct that springs forth even when there is no language to pick up from the environment. What you think you know is incorrect.
I said in the comment above that "knowledge" is represented as a structure of specialized areas of the brain - stored procedures, if you wish, but the system needs to be "trained" by the spoken (or signed) language from the shared environment.
The "machinery" probably has notions of a thing, a process, and an attribute, because it reflects characteristics of shared physical environment and every human language has nouns, verbs and adjectives. There are also notions of time and space, due to serialized input of sense organs and self-centered nature of our perception.
Evolved, highly-specialized machinery of the brain's specialized areas reflects major characteristics of the shared environment available to it through the sense organs. There is nothing more than that. No other "knowledge".
She's right about our education system. As John Taylor Gotti explains, it was designed in the nineteenth century to produce factory workers who would not think for themselves, but just take orders. But what we need today and tomorrow is people who will learn on their own initiative and figure out intelligent solutions (like open source software developers), and so we need an educational system that will encourage that sort of behavior. What Gopnik is saying that this is something natural for children, if we put them in the right circumstances.