[Paper Review] Object permanence in newborn chicks is robust against opposing evidence

Justin N. Wood, Tomer Ullman+3 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Feb 22, 2024

Animal Behavior and Reproduction36 citations

TL;DR

The paper shows that object permanence in newborn chicks remains true even when reared in virtual environments with nonstandard object continuity, suggesting prenatal development and robustness to opposing evidence.

ABSTRACT

Newborn animals have advanced perceptual skills at birth, but the nature of this initial knowledge is unknown. Is initial knowledge flexible, continuously adapting to the statistics of experience? Or can initial knowledge be rigid and robust to change, even in the face of opposing evidence? We address this question through controlled-rearing experiments on newborn chicks. First, we reared chicks in an impoverished virtual world, where objects never occluded one another, and found that chicks still succeed on object permanence tasks. Second, we reared chicks in a virtual world in which objects teleported from one location to another while out of view: an unnatural event that violates the continuity of object motion. Despite seeing thousands of these violations of object permanence, and not a single non-violation, the chicks behaved as if object permanence were true, exhibiting the same behavior as chicks reared with natural object permanence events. We conclude that object permanence develops prenatally and is robust to change from opposing evidence.

Motivation & Objective

• Investigate whether initial object-permanence knowledge in newborn chicks is flexible or robust.
• Test object permanence under impoverished and non-continuous visual statistics in a controlled-rearing setup.
• Determine whether prenatal object-permanence knowledge persists under opposing evidence.

Proposed method

• Reared chicks in an impoverished virtual world where objects never occluded each other.
• Reared chicks in a virtual world where objects teleported out of view, violating continuity of motion.
• Compared behaviors to chicks reared with natural object-permanence events.
• Measured performance on object-permanence tasks to assess robustness.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 Is initial object-permanence knowledge in newborn chicks flexible and updated by experience?
• RQ2 Does prenatal object-permanence persist when exposed to violations of continuity of apparent object motion?
• RQ3 Is object permanence robust to opposing evidence in early development?

Key findings

• Chicks succeed on object-permanence tasks even in an impoverished virtual world.
• Chicks behave as if object permanence is true despite thousands of teleports violating continuity.
• Object permanence appears to develop prenatally and remains robust to opposing evidence.