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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 exper

• YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  >> 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.
• YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  >> 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.
  • Cogito 10y ago
    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.
    • YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago