Probabilistic tools to gauge 6-month infants' ability to detect contingency
Adults are capable of very fine motor skills whereas newborn babies’ motions are less accurately adjusted to the environment. It has been suggested that babies are sensitive to sensorimotor contingencies so they can acquire their body knowhow by gradually linking each body movement to its perceptual consequences. The research we pursued in the team is part of this theoretical framework. We use behavioural measurements to study how babies refine their body knowhow over time.During my internship, we studied arm differentiation in infants of age 6 months. An artificial contingency was established between the movements of one of the babies’ arms and the appearance of visual and auditory stimuli on both of their arms. My goal was to develop analytical tools to assess if babies detect the contingency (i.e. if they realize that they caused the occurrence of the stimuli). I tried to reproduce the probabilistic methodology developed by J. Watson in his experiments with 4month old babies. I could not obtain reliable results and so pursued my investigations. I adapted Watson’s analytical tools to create a binary indicator measuring the success of babies at the individual level. I showed that babies can differentiate between a situation where without doubt they have no control and a situation where they could be the cause of the stimulus. However, because babies who tried to test the contingency behaved similarly in both the test and the control group I can not ascertain that babies from the contingent group understood that they triggered the contingency.