What Babies Know About Physics and Foreign Languages
&gt;&gt; The babies seemed to figure out that when the experimenter’s arms were wrapped up, she couldn’t use her hands, and that must have been why she had used her head instead. So when it was the babies’ turn they took the easy route and tapped the box with their hands.<p>Or maybe the babies had just completely forgot about the experimenter and his wrapped-up hands and didn&#x27;t even &quot;tap&quot; the box but more like &quot;bumped into&quot; it hands-first. The difference between a &quot;tap with intent&quot; and a &quot;bump without intent&quot; or even a &quot;tap without specific intent other than basic curiosity&quot; is probably not even possible to measure.<p>That&#x27;s why I find it very hard to trust experiments like this: they&#x27;re supposed to tell us something about the way babies think but we can&#x27;t actually check we got the right end of the stick. They&#x27;re babies, so we can&#x27;t just ask them. If we asked adults to do the same thing we wouldn&#x27;t learn anything new either. So what&#x27;s the point?<p>The result is that researchers get into this elaborate dance with their subjects trying to set things up so there&#x27;s no plausible alternative explanation than what the research is trying to show- but a) there always is and b) it&#x27;s pretty damn annoying to what lengths the research goes to avoid admitting (a).<p>Also, once I find one such transgression in an article I then find it very hard to read through with any shred of trust to the writer.