by the rotating screen until the screen leaned right up against the box at 112*. The infants spent more time looking at the impossible event, which suggests that they understood that the object couldn’t have disappeared. Conversely, the infants spent less time looking at the possible event, which suggests that this event was not interesting to them because they knew that the object had permanence. Therefore, some 3 -months-old and 4 -months-old do have object permanence.In order to set up a valid experiment, one must make sure all the aspects of the experiment are solid. Baillargeon set up an experiment that concentrated on object permanence, because she used proven facts from other researchers. The reason Baillargeon used DeLoache’s article in her research was to validate one of her experiments that didn’t perform the way she expected. DeLoache’s article states that infants habituate at different times, some fast and some slow, but all infants are able to habituate to the same level. Thus, once habituated properly, no matter how many tries, both fast and slow habituates are able to perform the same way. This interested Baillargeon because in one of her experiments, the infants who habituated slower weren’t able to tell the impossible and possible events apart. As she explained, “Their patterns were not unexpected, because rate of habituation is known to relate to posthabituation performance.” (P.660, Baillargeon, 1987). Although Baillargeon was not able to get the kind of results she wanted in one of her three experiments, she did prove object permanence. DeLoache would argue that the reason Baillargeon didn’t get the results she predicted is she didn’t let the slow habituates properly habituate to the stimuli. DeLoache states that infants who habituate at their own rate will do just as well as those who habituate fast. Thus, if Baillargeon would have let the infants ta...
