Thank you. It makes me sad that HN commenters rush to dismiss research because they had one idea in 5 seconds and didn't consider that the professionals working for months might have already thought of that.
The experiment still seems flawed, why can't the results be explained by "Some babies dislike certain toys and prefer new toys over those they dislike."
The fact that all the toys were equally preferred by a control group is an unconvincing control since individuals have different preferences.
It's swap methodology is also unconvincing. Why couldn't the baby simply be avoiding a toy that was effectively taken away?
> why can't the results be explained by "Some babies dislike certain toys and prefer new toys over those they dislike."
It actually is explained this way in the paper: "If infants do exhibit choice-induced preference change, they should prefer the novel toy and avoid the previously unchosen toy."
The thing is, they are not only testing for this "obvious" conclusion. Each subsequent experiment tries to invalidate the previous one's conclusions. They thought of 4 experiments, and maybe even more could be done.
> It's swap methodology is also unconvincing. Why couldn't the baby simply be avoiding a toy that was effectively taken away?
This is a good reasoning — if the infants are aware of the swap, their thinking could be "I chose that and didn't get it, now I don't like it / don't want it anymore". Even then, it still points to the same direction: the infants are changing their preferences based on their first choice, now rejecting something they wanted but didn't get.
