Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Understanding How Babies Form Ideas about Objects is Quinn’s Goal
As any parent or caregiver will tell you, figuring out how to keep an infant happy can be a challenging task. Understanding how infants as young as three months old synthesize and catalogue information is the much more difficult task Paul Quinn tackles in his infant cognition research.
Quinn and his research assistants study how babies put parts of an object together in their minds to form ideas of the whole object, and then place these object wholes into mental category representations. How does Quinn conduct research with infants?
“Working with infants can be methodologically challenging,“ he concedes. “After all, you can’t simply ask them to answer questions. But babies do have abilities you can use to get answers, including visual selectivity.” Quinn typically works with infants in three age groups: three to four months, six to seven months, and nine to 10 months.
By employing “novelty preference techniques” patient researchers can perceive differences in how babies respond to objects. Quinn simplifies the explanation of the technique this way: “If you show babies an image of a square for 10 seconds, their attention remains for several seconds. If you repeatedly show the same square, they get bored and attention span shortens. If you then introduce another shape – say a circle – attention perks up again because they perceive the difference.”
In a widely cited study, Quinn showed babies repeated images of cats, then images of a new cat paired with a dog. The infants generalized their responsiveness to the new cat and showed heightened visual attention to the new dog. This pattern of responsiveness allowed Quinn to infer that infants were grouping the cats into a category, and keeping dogs out of the mental representation of cats. Although infants don’t understand “cat” in the way an adult does, “this shows how early category representations can serve as placeholders for the kind of information you acquire as an adult,” notes Quinn. “Categorization allows infants to store information in an organized way, and that’s how they begin to form concepts.”
Quinn’s research is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
He wasn’t always drawn to babies, but did major in Psychology as an undergraduate, receiving an ScB degree, which Quinn describes as “Psychology with some Biology, Chemistry, and Physics thrown in.” Research for a lab studying adult visual cognition followed, and when the opportunity to work in an infant lab arose at the same time that a Time magazine cover story on how babies learn was published in 1983, his path was clear. “Infant cognition is still a relatively young area of study, and there is room to make a real contribution,” says Quinn.
His recent research on face perception has attracted notice and was the subject of a cover story in the APS Observer in 2008. This research examines how babies respond to social categories in faces such as gender and race, and indicates that familiarity is a more potent determinant of looking in the social domain. The research showed that babies come to prefer same-race faces and also prefer one gender versus another depending on the gender of the primary caregiver, which suggests the importance of early visual experience and the caregiver as a reference point for how babies respond to their social world.
Understanding how babies form their earliest mental representations has importance beyond the lab, according to Quinn. “I believe it supports the notion that quality stimulation is beneficial to infant development. In my opinion, parents who are interactive and verbally expressive in a positive emotional way will provide general stimulation to their infant’s cognitive development.”
