Challenging Object Permanence in Infants...Poorly.

What happens when you're looking to fill your 1000 words and get your paycheck? You head over to your local university and write something topically interesting. This requires close to no work and an interview lasting probably less than 30 minutes. In the Jan. 19th Time article What Do Babies Know, Michael Brunton, has written about the current affairs of object permanence research in babies. It is a clearly written and interesting article for the general population who doesn't know anything about developmental psychology, except perhaps the few bits about Jean Piaget they learned in their introductory psychology class in college 20 years ago. However, the writer clearly has not done his homework in writing this article (which horribly, is so often the case).

There are two major problems that jump out when reading the article.

The first is the validity of the researcher to begin with. While I only know what is written in the article about Sirois, it seems pretty clear that he hasn't proven himself as a researcher - the facility 'Babylab' is not two years old and hasn't tested more than 100 infant, publishing a single article in The European Journal of Developmental Psychology is not "already challenging current thinking" on the object permanence debate anymore than the other dozen or so papers (from well established labs) which have failed to successfully challenge the idea that object representations do not disappear when the object is no longer visible. In Sirois' experiments which supposedly "pour cold water over recent experiments" supporting object permanence, he argues that the interpretations of Baillargeon, Spelke, and others are wrong and that in fact a response to novel stimuli is what is to blame.

Clearly either the magazine or Sirois has not done their research and seen that indeed novelty is not to blame, since habituation trials do not even have to be used to demonstrate the violation of expectation (VOE) when objects perform unlikely or impossible actions. I get the feeling that Sirois might even be missing the boat since he makes this statement in the article,

From brain imaging studies we also know that the brain has some sort of visual buffer that continues to represent objects after they have been removed--a lingering perception rather than conceptual understanding. So when babies encounter novel or unexpected events...there's a mismatch between the buffer and the information they're getting at that moment and what you do when you've got a mismatch is you try to clear the butter and that takes attention

This clearly does not make sense if there was no lingering perception to begin with established with the habituation trials. Of course not all VOE experiments work without habituation but even if Sirois were able to completely knock down a set of experiments there are so many complementary experiments that are very different it is unlikely that he would change the way we think about object permanence in babies. Of course Sirois might have completely different views and much more convincing results than what is represented in this article but taken as it is I'm clearly not convinced.

The final complaint about the Time article is one solely about the author (and many other journalists!) and the way he went about writing the article. When you take the time to find a researcher who is doing potentially interesting work which is clearly challenging a major theory as well as the work of another researcher, you better also find the time to represent the views of the researcher who is being challenged. How is the public supposed to know what to believe when you don't represent the whole debate? The usual complaint about journalism is that a major figure or idea is presented (evolution is a perfect example) and then to give the other side of the argument a figure from the periphery, no matter how crazy sounding, is brought in to give a counter argument. This article starts from the periphery (though I doubt Sirois is crazy) and doesn't manage to bring in the established point of views opinions.

Original Time Article