Renee Baillargeon
Canadian-American developmental psychologist of infant reasoning
Developmental psychologist, now emerita at the University of Illinois. Using violation-of-expectation experiments she argued that infants reason about physical events much earlier than Piaget's account of object permanence suggested.
Why this person matters
Baillargeon's experiments challenged the age at which Piaget placed object permanence and opened a research programme on infant physical, psychological, biological and sociomoral reasoning.
Main contributions
Violation-of-expectation experiments
Her studies use fixation times: longer looking at impossible events is read as surprise. A 1991 study with Julie DeVos reported object permanence in infants as young as 3.5 months.
Early physical reasoning
Her work suggests infants understand solidity, containment and occlusion early on. She argues that Piaget's finding that object permanence emerges late reflected limited motor ability, not inadequate cognition.
Four reasoning domains
She studies early causal reasoning in four domains: physical, psychological, sociomoral and biological.
Context and limits
Gregor Schöner and Esther Thelen argued that Baillargeon overextended her object-permanence findings, and that looking-time results may show only that infants notice stimulus differences, not surprise at impossible events. She differs from her mentor Spelke by emphasising innate learning mechanisms over substantive innate knowledge. The sources read do not discuss replication.
In your introductory course
Lifespan development.Appears in the development chapter where Piaget's stages are challenged by looking-time studies of object permanence.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 9.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1981
Received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, supervised by Rochel Gelman and Elizabeth Spelke.
- 1985
Published Object permanence in five-month-old infants with Elizabeth Spelke and S. Wasserman.
- 1991
Reported a study with Julie DeVos on object permanence in 3.5-month-old infants.
- 2015
Elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Sources
- University of Illinois Department of Psychology, Renee Baillargeon profileUniversity. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Renee BaillargeonReference work. Reference article inspected.