Parents’ Notes Before Videos
Video recordings began when Peggy was 127 days old (5/29/78). These reflections are based on the 28 prior entries in the Vignette Corpus and memories they’ve refreshed. They point to six incidents which are to me the most informative about the beginning and direction of the Infant Peggy Study. Let’s begin with the primary one, in Vignette #22.
What was this about? There was an argument among academics about the import of experiments by a researcher, Meltzoff, who faulted Piaget’s theories for arguing that babiess were not capable of imitation. The “proof” for his point was that young babies were shown on video to stick out their tongues in response to such a stimulus from their mothers. (I applaud simple counter-examples.) Such was a timely forefront issue in the development psychology community. Sheldon Wagner, a graduate student friend at Harvard (and a former student in Piaget’s Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva), asked if I would permit such an experiment to be done with newborn Peggy; in Vignette #2. That initiative was blocked by snowstorms, difficulties in getting equipment, and most importantly, because knowledge of details of the experiment interfered with our family’s binding experiences with the new baby. THAT made us abandon participation (Vignette #5).
The proposal to begin a journal about Peggy’s development was first suggested by Robby, in Vignette 8. This was not surprising, inasmuch as he and Miriam had both been engaged in my explorations of what children were able to learn from computing at MIT’s Artifical Intelligence Lab. That, again, seemed natural to me, as a keeper of “Journals” since my early teens (too intellectual and dull to be personal diaries).
There were two more incidents that are important as judged by the Selfridge Challenge:
Previously, speech could have been perceived by Peggy as a background to a direct interchange between herself and another being focused on her needs and others’ care of her. In this situation of Vignette #16, Peggy was a non-participating witness of extended speech events, with no other action, among others for “several minutes.” What can one make of such a change in the evaluation of context? If such changes can be seen as altering focus of attention between perception of figure and ground in experiences, they represent situations where “easy” distinctions lead to unimagined changes of perspective -– a fundamentally powerful form of learning.
Even if that is arguably an interpretation possibility, one unique change of perspective can not take you very far. Are there other credible examples? Yes. See the discussion of >Vignette #152, where Peggy discovered the vertical dimension of her living space. These two examples represent accidental changes in the context of everyday life that foster changes of perspective, and eventually changes of behavior resulting in saltations of performance.
The final major incident in these early notes, Vignette #18, exhibits how perception/recognition based expectation disappointments witness the early existence of experience-based cognitive structures and their modification.
During meetings with Mimi Sinclair (more formally Mme. Professor H. Sinclair, President of the Faculty of Psychology and the Science of Education of the University of Geneva, Colleague of the Center of Genetic Epistemology and Co-Author of works with Jean Piaget, Barbel Inhelder and Magali Bovet), memorialized in Vignette #24, we benefited from her suggestions about how we could undertake a study which would both be consonant with ongoing research of the Genevan School of Developmental Psychology and would complement their work as extensions of The Intimate Study (represented by both LC1 and LC2 here). More information on her suggestions will set out in contexts where most specifically relevant).
Analyst
