Babies Born With Intuitive Grasp Of Physics, Scientists Say

Joseph Castro, LiveScience Staff Writer
01/24/2012 06:22 PM EST
LiveScience

Infants as young as 2 months old already have basic knowledge of "intuitive physics," researchers report in a new study.

Most studies into infant cognition employ eye-tracking technology — psychologists can tease out what an infant is thinking and what she considers to be unexpected by following her gaze in different scenarios. This method, called violation of expectation, involves showing babies photos, videos or events that proceed as expected, followed by others that break everyday rules. If the infant understands the implicit rules, he or she will show little interest in an expected situation, but will stare at images of a surprising event.

But at what point in their development do babies begin to understand how the physical world works?

"We believe that infants are born with expectations about the objects around them, even though that knowledge is a skill that's never been taught," Kristy vanMarle, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri, said in a statement. "As the child develops, this knowledge is refined and eventually leads to the abilities we use as adults."

To come to this conclusion, vanMarle and her colleague, Susan Hespos, a psychologist at Northwestern University, reviewed infant cognition research conducted over the last 30 years. They found that infants already have an intuitive understanding of certain physical laws by 2 months of age, when they start to track moving objects with both eyes consistently and can be tested with eye-tracking technology.

For instance, at this age they understand that unsupported objects will fall (gravity) and hidden objects don't cease to exist. In one test, researchers placed an object inside of a container and moved the container; 2-month-old infants knew that the hidden object moved with the container.

This innate "physics" knowledge only grows as the infants experience their surroundings and interact more with the world. By 5 months of age, babies understand that solid objects have different properties than noncohesive substances, such as water, the researchers found.

In a 2009 study, a research team (which included Hespos) habituated 5-month-old infants to either a blue solid or a blue liquid in a glass cup, which appeared to be the same when at rest. They tipped the glasses left and right, and poured the contents into other glasses, allowing the infants to form ideas about how the substances worked. Infants habituated to the liquid (but not the solid) weren't surprised that straws could penetrate it, but were confused when straws couldn’t penetrate the blue solid. The opposite happened with infants habituated to the solid.

Hespos and vanMarle also learned that babies have rudimentary math abilities: Six-month-old infants can discriminate between numbers of dots (if one set held twice as many dots as the other), and 10-month-old infants can pick out which of two cups holds more liquid (if one cup held four times as much liquid as the other). Also at 10 months of age, babies will consistently choose larger amounts of food — such as crackers — in cups, though only if there are no more than three items in any cup.

While infants appear to be born with intuitive physics knowledge, the researchers believe that parents can further assist their children in developing expectations about the world through normal interactions, such as talking, playing peek-a-boo or letting them handle various safe objects.

"Natural interaction with the parent and objects in the world gives the child all the input that evolution has prepared the child to seek, accept and use to develop intuitive physics," vanMarle said.

The study was published in the January issue of the journal WIREs Cognitive Science.

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Comments

[mathislaw1]

08:29 PM on 03/03/2012

This is one of the keys that separate us from other primates. I watched a program about it. An experiment was done using balls of the same shape but each with different weights. The balls had to be used to dislodge something that blocked a treat. The heavier balls would dislodge the object but the lighter ones would not. Human babies instinctively understood they need to use the heavy balls, but the chimpanzee babies would randomly use any ball. Humans understood force and momentum while the chimps did not.

[sdterp]

04:12 PM on 02/08/2012

So, all of this innate understanding of basic physics is undone by elementary school? Is that the work of local customs? Precepts? Religion?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/07/science-education-fordham-institute_n_1259445.html?ref=science

[syntax facit saltum]

10:36 PM on 01/31/2012

I find Janet Werker's work really interesting.

[syntax facit saltum]

10:33 PM on 01/31/2012

This is old news.

[wbthacker]

03:45 PM on 01/31/2012

I think it's remarkable that people think this is remarkable.

Every animal is born with intuitions like this. A newborn horse not only has an intuitive sense of physics, it can actually balance itself and walk almost immediately, and recognize its mother from all the rest of the herd. A newly hatched alligator can feed itself; that is, it knows safe foods from unsafe ones.

Bluntly, baby humans are pretty stupid by comparison, and understandably so. We're born before our brains are completely developed, so that our heads are small enough to fit through the birth canal. In a sense, humans are all "premature births" compared to most mammals.

But, yeah... babies are cute and fascinating. :-)

[proscanusa]

10:11 AM on 02/03/2012

In actuality the shoulders are equally if not greater an issue at birth. The entrance of the birth canal is widest from side to side relative to the mother’s body. Midway through, this orientation shifts 90 degrees, and the long axis of the oval extends from the front of the mother’s body to her back. The body’s largest dimension [the shoulders] is always aligned with the largest dimension of the birth canal. The notion that our heads are “underdeveloped” resulting in smaller heads due to size accommodation at birth is not really true. Moreover, the perception we are stupid compared to most animals is laughable.
The only wiggle room I can give you here is the skull is soft by natural design, not underdeveloped, because it must maneuver as the shoulders do to make its way - but clearly the brain is not underdeveloped and your comment that humans are stupid compared to most animals at birth or anyother time is plain bunkum.

[Ossit]

03:23 PM on 01/30/2012

Babies are incredible not to mention adorable.

[hattrick752]

06:50 PM on 01/28/2012

of course they do have an intuitive grasp of physics. it is only when they are growing up, we feed them some stories from a mythological, unscientific, irrational, misogynist book called the bible and mess their minds. case in point - a baby would intuitively know that whe you put food in your mouth you chew it and swallow it. we tell the baby that jonah survived in the belly of the 'fish' and that it is the absolute truth and she/he should not question it as it is not 'pleasing' to god. see....how we mess up young minds?

[RealistBC]

07:20 AM on 01/27/2012

I've been around babies all of my life, and they are incredibly fascinating. There is no more important role for adults in this world than raising children.

[John Hay]

11:59 PM on 01/26/2012

That's all well and good. But I can predict what Gingrich thinks. What he would do in most circumstances. How he would treat people if he was POTUS. And I've never met, or ever want to meet the Creep!

[proscanusa]

10:13 AM on 02/03/2012

John hauled hay and nobody cared....

[bklynsparrow]

08:12 PM on 01/26/2012

I've always believed that babies are innate geniuses- when you understand the amount of information they absorb and the rapid rate at which they change, it's not surprising. That's why they are so wonderful- an unvarnished assessment of data constantly streaming through those brains. We always talk about the innocence of babes- I guess when life experience takes that away eventually, that genius ability fades away.

[RegLib2]

07:14 PM on 01/26/2012

Mostly I was happy when each of my babies figured out the law of gravity. There was always alot of kissing of owies before that.

[RegLib2]

07:12 PM on 01/26/2012

Babies are the perfect scientists. They only believe in what they can observe, and they experiment with that until they understand it.

[wbthacker]

03:35 PM on 01/31/2012

Technically, the finding described in this article says you're wrong. If babies are born with an intuitive sense of physics, they are born believing things they didn't observe.

Of course you're right that they immediately begin refining their inborn intuitions with real-world observations, so I get your point. But as the saying goes, "Those ideas that we have, and don' t know we have, have us." Even adult humans frequently misunderstand their own observations because of instincts we were born with.

[syntax facit saltum]

10:44 PM on 01/31/2012

This is not true. There are things babies believe for which they have no positive evidence. This is because they are hard wired to acquire certain types of knowledge-- for example, to acquire human language, the baby, like the adult, can figure out the rules not just of what you can say, but also what you cannot say. Even though there are an infinite number of sentences possible-- that is, they are not learning by memorizing. They learn because, essentially, it is instinctive.

[baldinia]

06:27 PM on 01/26/2012

Babies are born with an intuitive grasp of Physics. This understanding increases as they grow & interact with the world. They later attend college, where they enroll in Intro to Physics, & fail miserably.

[jmengr]

11:03 AM on 01/26/2012

Very important for our ancestors to be able to judge gravitational acceleration when leaping from branch to branch...

I you're a fundamentalist xian, pretend you never read this.

[proscanusa]

10:25 AM on 02/03/2012

All things accelerate in a gravitational fields at the same rate relative to the center of mass At different points on fall with an acceleration between 9.78 and 9.82 m/s2. This fact is subject to little variance other than latitude, with a conventional standard value of exactly 9.80665 m/s2 (approx. 32 ft/s squared).
Come on over and join us. There’s a higher intelligence and power, patiently waiting for you..promise.

[jmengr]

12:51 PM on 02/06/2012

My comment about the xians is in reference to their denial of evolution. It must be hard for them to maintain such a bubble of delusion.

[coffeeparty]

07:58 AM on 01/26/2012

Why just last night my 3 month old son was working on a revision of Einstein's formula E=MC2.
Nah, he was just drinking formula.