Week 3 Post 1

There was a lot of information talked about this week about learning from newborn to toddlers. One thing that really peaked my interest was the stages developmental growth. As this topic was further researched I found I came upon an article talking about an experiment that was done with babies. The experiment was based on the fact that babies are known to stare longer and an action or object if that thing surprises them or challenges their expectations. After the scientist discussed what kind of experiment they came up with one involving food and toys. They started with crackers and milk and distributed it evenly as the baby watched. They then repeated the exercise with the crackers and milk but they distributed is unevenly. They observed from this that the babies stared longer at the action of splitting the food up unevenly. After that was established the scientist then decided to test the babies to see if they actually comprehended what happened. They let them all play with toys and noted their favorite one. They then brought a stranger into the room and asked the babies for the toys. It was noted that the babies who stared longer at the first food experiment were more “sharers” than the other babies that were labeled as “shellfish sharers.” I wanted to go in more detail with this because I found it so intriguing that the babies were only fifteen months old! My question to this is, do you think that this would be considered observational learning, as in they learned right from wrong from observing their parents or is it just Nature that plays the role in this?