Thursday, February 25, 2010

An Obvious Result

From my notes on a recent lecture about modularity nativism, this is my favorite statement:

"Rabbit experiment - the 'rabbit in window' view (most rabbit) was looked at most [by infant participants]."

I mean, duh - who wouldn't look longest at the view that gave them the "most rabbit"? I don't organize my entire life around maximizing my exposure to rabbit pictures, but I am at this moment facing a wall with 30 rabbit images on it (and have an extra computer screen next to me on this desk displaying my prized Leo as Unstoppable Force / Master of the Universe photograph).

Actually, I thought that the findings were completely expected on other grounds (I think I spent the entire class period listening to some experiment that supposedly supported nativism but that was obviously grievously flawed and could be countered with a simple methodological change only to then be presented with the results of the counter experiment I had just been thinking about and which supported the other view - it was kind of bizarre), but I did savor the whole "more rabbit" aspect of the thing.

And on this note: More Rabbit for you to look at.

When you look at the rabbit, the rabbit looks back at you

2 comments:

rvman said...

Leo says: Keep those infants away from me! They look like weird furless hybrid human-rabbits. Scary!

Tam said...

So is that a tall rabbit or a short rabbit?