use of an eye tracker, Baillargeon and DeVos concluded that the longer length of time spent looking at the taller carrot showed that 3.5-month-old infants knew the existence, height, and direction of the carrot, and they had an expectation to see the tall carrot appear over the short screen. Baillargeon uses the term "violation of expectation paradigm" to account for the surprise which infants show by gazing longer at an impossible event. Baillargeon expresses contrasting ideas to those of her mentor Elizabeth Spelke. Although both Baillargeon and Spelke believe that children are born with some understanding of the world, Baillargeon claims that this understanding comes in the form of innate learning mechanisms while Spelke argues that infants are born with substantive knowledge regarding objects. Baillargeon claims that infants learn to reason about novel physical phenomena by forming an all or nothing concept, adding discrete and continuous variables that seem to affect the event, and lastly they reason qualitatively and quantitatively. Criticisms Baillargeon's research on object permanence met criticism from Gregor Schoner and Esther Thelen. Schoner and Thelen argued that Baillargeon was overly extrapolating the results of her studies on infants' knowledge regarding object permanence. They believe that the violation of expectation paradigm merely signifies that infants notice a difference between the stimuli, such as more movement or different colors, as opposed to showing surprise at the sight of a seemingly impossible event. Despite these criticisms, Baillargeon's work continues to be influential in developmental psychology. Major works Awards 1989: Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award from the American Psychological Association. 1991: Guggenheim Fellow. 2007: Elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 2013: Fyssen Foundation International Prize for contributing vast knowledge on the theme "Human Cognitive Development." 2015: Elected to the National Academy of Sciences. References External links Faculty Biography, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois Infant Cognition Lab Living people 1954 births American women psychologists American developmental psychologists Canadian women psychologists Canadian psychologists Canadian expatriate academics in the United States Developmental psychologists Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences McGill University alumni University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences alumni University of Texas at Austin faculty University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty Cognitive development researchers Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences American women academics 21st-century American women American cognitive scientists