I learned something from reading this article about a classic experimental finding in developmental psychology:
So you keep hiding the toy in “A” and the baby keeps searching for the toy in “A.” Simple enough. But what happens if you suddenly hide the toy in “B”? Remember, you’re hiding the toy in full view of the infant. An older child or an adult would simply reach for “B” to retrieve the toy. But not the infant. But, despite having just seen the object hidden in the new “B” location, infants between 8 and 12 months of age (the age at which infants begin to have enough motor control to successfully reach for an object) frequently look for it under box “A,” where it had previously been hidden. This effect, first demonstrated by Jean Piaget, is called the perseverative search error or sometimes the A-not-B error.
The result is robust to many variations on the experiment and the full article goes through some hypotheses about the error and a new experiment that turns them on their head.
Cheap Talk 
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
May 20, 2011 at 12:22 pm
brian
this sounds related to the notion of object permanence, which is a concept that infants learn at some point. we’re not born with the understanding that when objects are outside the scope of our direct perception they do not cease to exist. this is apparently why infants love peek-a-boo: they’re genuinely surprised when your face reappears. without this understanding, the A-not-B error seems easy to rationalize. the hidden object ceases to exist anyway once its hidden, whereas experience says that objects simply appear behind door A. i didn’t read the article, so this hypothesis could well be rejected, but that was the first thought i had.
March 19, 2014 at 3:58 am
Rodolfo
choice for this What the hell are you tkialng about? Except tkialng out your ass . Tiff and May have been friends for years May invited him on this show.