John Locke VS Babies

Another great English philosopher, John Locke, posed another classical epistemological problem. What would happen if you miraculously restored the sight of someone who had been blind from birth? Would that person recognize all the objects he had known so intimately through touch, or would he have to painstakingly learn that the smooth, hard, curved surface looked like a porcelain teacup, or that the familiar, soft, yielding swells and silky hairs translated into a visual wife? Locke thought that the blind man would have to learn to make connections between the two types of experience.

Babies are a more common miracle than suddenly cured blind men, and it turns out you can ask them Locke's question, too. They think Locke, like Berkeley, got it wrong. Andy gave one-month-old babies one of two pacifiers to suck on. either a bumpy one or a smooth one. The babies never saw the pacifiers. They just felt them. Then he let the babies look at bumpy and smooth objects, without letting them feel them. The babies looked longer at the object that was the same shape as the one they had just been sucking on. Somehow, they could relate the feel of the pacifier in their mouths with its visual image.

You can ask the same question about the relationship between sound and vision. Even newborns will turn their heads and look toward an interesting noise, suggesting that they already expect to see something in the direction of the noise. You can do more systematic experiments to test this, too. For instance, you can show babies two objects bouncing at different times and play an audiotape of a boing, boing, boing sound that is synchronous with only one of them. Babies can tell which visual display matches what they hear; they look longer at the one that bounces in sync with the audiotape.

Even more startling, Andy and Pat showed babies a silent video of a face saying either ahhh or eeee, and then they played the babies audiotapes of each vowel sound. Five-month-olds could tell which face went with which sound. They looked at the face with the wide-open mouth when they heard the ahhh sound and at the face with pulled-back lips when they heard the eeee sound. Babies evidently have a primitive ability to lip-read, at least for simple vowels. (This was a provocative experiment—all those wide-open mouths and ahhhs. Soon after they finished doing the study together, Andy and Pat got married.)

So in the first few months of life, babies already seem to have solved a number of deep philosophical conundrums. They know how to use edges and patterns of movement to segregate the world into separate objects. They know something about how those objects characteristically move. They know that those objects are part of a three-dimensional space. And they know the relationship between information that comes from their different senses—they can link the feel of a nipple and its pink protuberance, the sound of a voice and the moving lips they see, the ball's exuberant bounce and its accompanying boing.

Notes:

Locke wondered if a blind person given sight would need to learn how to associate this new sense with the others, but babies make these associations instinctively.

Folksonomies: science philosophy development senses

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The Pacifier (0.738880): website | dbpedia | freebase | yago
Ben Linus (0.645643): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Bounce message (0.607524): dbpedia | yago
Faces (0.574761): dbpedia

 The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Gopnik , Meltzoff , Kuhl (2001-01-01), The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind, Harper Paperbacks, Retrieved on 2011-07-06
Folksonomies: education parenting pregnancy babies children infancy