十大经典心理学研究.docxVIP

1 What Are Babies Watching?The first study for your consideration in the top ten psychology studies is by Robert Fantz, a developmental psychologist, and it is deceptively simple. Like many of us staring at young babies, Fantz wondered how much they understand about the world. The eyes of tiny infants look glazed and they mostly seem concerned with the bare necessities of life.The eyes of tiny infants look glazed and they mostly seem concerned with the bare necessities of life. What do they understand about the world and how can you possibly find out, given that babies are not so hot on answering complex questions about their perceptual abilities?In 1961, when Fantz carried out his experiment, there wasnt much you could do to find out what was going on in a babys head - other than watch. And watching the baby is what he did.An enduring feature of human nature is if theres something of interest near us, we generally look at it. So Fantz set up a display board above the baby to which were attached two pictures (Fantz, 1961). On one was a bulls-eye and on the other was the sketch of a human face. Then, from behind the board, invisible to the baby, he peeked through a hole to watch what the baby looked at.Results...a two-month old baby looked twice as much at the human face as it did at the bulls-eye.What he found was that a two-month old baby looked twice as much at the human face as it did at the bulls-eye. This suggested that human babies have some powers of pattern and form selection. Before this it was thought that babies looked out onto a chaotic world of which they could make little sense.In modern psychology the descendents of this experiment are still used today to find out what babies understand about the world. These have discovered that were remarkably early developers. At one month we can follow a slow-moving object. At two months we can move both our eyes together and begin to appreciate how far away things are. At three months we can tell the difference b