Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Current research has consistently shown that children substantially younger than 2 years of age understand object permanence; i.e. infants have realistic expectations of where hidden objects should reappear, and they react with increased looking time to experimenter-manipulated violations of object permanence. However, new research has revealed that 2-year-olds' understanding of…
Current research has consistently shown that children substantially younger than 2 years of age understand object permanence; i.e. infants have realistic expectations of where hidden objects should reappear, and they react with increased looking time to experimenter-manipulated violations of object permanence. However, new research has revealed that 2-year-olds' understanding of object permanence does not seem to transfer to active search tasks. Although infants look longer when an object moves behind a screen and is subsequently shown to have "magically" passed through a solid barrier, 2-year-olds do not search correctly for an object that has moved behind a panel of four doors and stopped at a barrier that is visible above the correct door. However, 2-year-olds do search flawlessly on a warm-up task in which the experimenter hides a stationary object behind one of the doors. Due to these conflicting results, I designed three search tasks to test whether the method of hiding the object affects young 2-year-olds' ability to successfully search. I used a simplified three-door apparatus with stationary objects in which children were allowed to search only one door per trial. In the Hide-3 search task, the experimenter opened a door, placed a toy in the doorway, and closed the door. In the Reveal-3 search task, all doors opened and closed simultaneously without the experimenter touching one door, and a toy was revealed already in place in a doorway. In the Reveal-2 search task, the experimenter hid the toy identically as in Reveal-3, except a hand puppet opened an incorrect door immediately after the toy was hidden, leaving two remaining doors for the child to search. If infants' and 2-year-olds' knowledge of a hidden object's location is activated in previous looking time experiments, then the puppet's incorrect search in Reveal-2 should facilitate their search performance relative to Reveal-3 by activating this knowledge. My results suggest that young 2-year-olds are not using knowledge of the hidden object's location to guide search. Instead, their performance is best explained by a utilization of alternate search strategies including imitation of the adult and salience differentials between search options. These results call into question a fundamental tenet of modern child psychology, that by 2 years of age children use their knowledge of object permanence to guide search under a variety of hiding and disappearance conditions.
