1. Infant development is not my area of research.

2. Nonetheless, simply because of skepticism, I have thought seriously about the frequent and elaborate claims made about infants/toddlers by developmental psychologists.  Claims are usually based on the stare-look method whereby interpretations follow about infants' thoughts/intentions/choices based on the duration (and latency?) of staring @ "exerimental" constructs.

3. Unless I am mistaken, none of these reports evaluates any or a broad range of alternate hypotheses (eg that infants may respond to motion or complexity or other stimulus combinations etc etc; that results may be quasi-random; that Bayesian techniques have been used; that math techniques such as agent-based modeling have been conducted).

4. These studies on infants&toddlers appear to assume that the little ones see and interpret the world as the experimenters do.

5. I implore readers to view You Tube footage on these types of studies. Among other things, even a toddler could see that the little people are prompted shamelessly by the researchers.

6. IMO there are no reliable controls in these infant/toddler studies.

7. I am particularly concerned that there appears to be no published debate at all concerning the methods, designs, inferences, reliability, validity, background neuroscience, veridical ecology, etc etc of these studies. Even in so-called "hard sciences" & mathematics any claim, particularly, a strong claim, is followed by vigorous challenges--sometimes before a paper has been published or before it's print is dry. This is simply the way science proceeds.

8. Social science investigations are often driven by the authority of a very few, high profile, very bright, very influential, very confident and vocal researchers whose opinions dampen debate & generate supplicants. The infant/toddler field is no exception.

9. Notwithstanding, these little mammals who serve as subjects in the infant/toddler research programs are really cute.

@cbjones1943

Have you been reading any actual academic articles, or do you draw these conclusions from reading informal journalism like this? I ask because there is EXTENSIVE debate in the field about possible alternative hypotheses (including those you specifically suggest, such as surface features like contrast and movement patterns, as well as debate about possible underlying mechanisms driving the observed behavior, etc). I don't know what you could possibly be reading that you feel comfortable saying "none of these reports evaluates any of a broad range of alternate hypotheses," and you feel you have some special insight into the matter. There are, for instance, litterally dozens of published articles in high-profile journals proposing and testing Bayesian models for infant learning in a variety of domains. Regarding the YouTUbe videos you reference, I beg to remind you that most parents will not give permission for a researcher to publish a video of their child online, and as a results most researchers do not ask for it. That is why there are only a handful of such videos available when literally thousands of labs are conducting infant research every day. The videos that do make it to YouTube are often from less-professional projects (like an undergraduate's senior thesis study). You seem like rational thinker - surely you will agree that it is nonsense to take a handful of YouTube videos to be representative of an entire field of research. A well-designed experiment is very carefully controlled, and the experimenter is nearly always blind to the hypotheses and/or to the condition the child has been assigned to, so that it is impossible for the experimenter to systematically bias the infant's responses. 

When members of the media report developmental psychology research, parents are generally the target audience. For this reason, the emphasis is generally on easy, interesting take-home messages (which are often a serious over-extension of the actual data reported, and sometimes even directly contradict the more cautious claims the researchers make in their own papers). This happens with many fields, but I think developmental psychology suffers particularly from softening by the media. If you wish to make claims about the field and the scientists working in it, you're going to need to look somewhere besides labspaces.net and youtube.com.