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Two degrees of separation? Spelke, Hauser and my baby

Something about Marc Hauser’s now questionable research sounded familiar to me. Then I read that he worked with Harvard researcher Elizabeth Spelke.

Turns out I enrolled my infant son (now 12) in one of her experiments. And the study that appears to be based on the data includes Hauser as a co-author.

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I also published something on the study: a column in The Boston Globe.

The study was designed to see how infants perceive the boundaries between such natural objects.

Apparently…findings from tests on Truman and other babies will be compared with test results from baby monkeys. So my son made his contribution to science by watching a hand fiddle with a small pumpkin and a ginger root. Why not a banana and an orange?

“We tried to pick things that are not familiar to babies,’’ Candry said.

She led us to a room down the hall from the reception area, where I sat in front of a small, gray, puppet show-like stage with Truman on my lap. Floor-to-ceiling curtains framed the stage and hid the rest of the room, except for a student to my left who was focusing a video camera on us.

The screen in front of us lifted to reveal a miniature pumpkin sitting atop a gnarly ginger root. Truman looked at the camera for a while, until a hand appeared from the top of the stage and touched the pumpkin. Truman seemed mildly interested, then glanced back at the camera. The hand disappeared, reappeared, and touched the pumpkin, disappeared, reappeared, touched, disappeared, reappeared and so on for what seemed like a long time but was probably only five minutes.

Then the hand picked up the pumpkin, put it down, picked it up, put it down, a number of times. Truman looked and looked away. Then, the pumpkin started sticking to the gingerroot and the hand lifted both of them. I suspected Truman was supposed to take special interest in this change, but he didn’t.

After about 15 minutes, the vegetable puppet show ended.

They said Truman (“research subject number 036’’) did well. On the way out, we got a computer printout of his results along with our sippy cup. It included several rows of numbers under columns marked “CRIT. . .TIMEON. ..SECND. . .LTNCY. . .TMOFF. . ..‘’ All this was meaningless to me, but apparently important to Dr. Spelke’s work.

It seemed a little anticlimactic, but perhaps that’s science. For every eureka moment, there are, I suppose, hours, even years, of tedious data collection. Someday, Dr. Spelke’s findings may help inform authors of the infant development books that fill several shelves in Barnes & Noble. And I’ll be able to tell Truman that, along with some experimental monkeys, he made his contribution to the science of babyhood.

Or not. Here’s what looks like the results of the research :

From the MIT’s Journal of Congnitive Neuroscience (2001 Jan 1;13(1):44-58.)

Visual representation in the wild: how rhesus monkeys parse objects.

Munakata Y, Santos LR, Spelke ES, Hauser MD, O’Reilly RC.

Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Co 80208, USA

Abstract

Visual object representation was studied in free-ranging rhesus monkeys. To facilitate comparison with humans, and to provide a new tool for neurophysiologists, we used a looking time procedure originally developed for studies of human infants. Monkeys’ looking times were measured to displays with one or two distinct objects, separated or together, stationary or moving. Results indicate that rhesus monkeys used featural information to parse the displays into distinct objects, and they found events in which distinct objects moved together more novel or unnatural than events in which distinct objects moved separately. These findings show both commonalities and contrasts with those obtained from human infants. We discuss their implications for the development and neural mechanisms of higher-level vision.

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