Violations of expectation trigger infants to search for explanations.

Infants look longer and explore more following violations-of-expectation, but the reasons for these surprise-induced behaviors are unclear. One possibility is that expectancy violations heighten arousal generally, thereby increasing infants' post-surprise activity. Another possibility is that infants' exploration reflects the search for an explanation for the surprising event. We tested these alternatives in three experiments. First in Experiment 1 we confirmed that seeing an object violate expectations (by passing through a solid wall) increased infants' exploration of the surprising object, relative to when no expectancy violation was seen. Then in Experiment 2 we measured infants' exploration after they had seen the same violation event, but then an explanation for the event was provided (the wall was revealed to have a large hole in it). We found that providing this explanation abolished infants' surprise-induced exploration. In Experiment 3 we replicated this effect. Furthermore, we found that the longer infants looked at the explanation, the greater their reversal in exploratory preference (i.e., the more they ignored the surprising object). These findings demonstrate that preverbal infants both seek and recognize explanations for surprising events.

Online measures of looking and learning in infancy.

Infants in laboratory settings look longer at events that violate their expectations, learn better about objects that behave unexpectedly, and match utterances to the objects that likely elicited them. The paradigms revealing these behaviors have become cornerstones of research on preverbal cognition. However, little is known about whether these canonical behaviors are observed outside laboratory settings. Here, we describe a series of online protocols that replicate classic laboratory findings, detailing our methods throughout. In Experiment 1a, 15-month-old infants (N = 24) looked longer at an online support event culminating in an Unexpected outcome (i.e., appearing to defy gravity) than an Expected outcome. Infants did not, however, show the same success with an online solidity event. In Experiment 1b, 15-month-old infants (N = 24) showed surprise-induced learning following online events-they were better able to learn a novel object's label when the object had behaved unexpectedly compared to when it behaved expectedly. Finally, in Experiment 2, 16-month-old infants (N = 20) who heard a valenced utterance ("Yum!") showed preferential looking to the object most likely to have generated that utterance. Together, these results suggest that, with some adjustments, online testing is a feasible and promising approach for infant cognition research.

Stable individual differences in infants' responses to violations of intuitive physics.

Infants look longer at impossible or unlikely events than at possible events. While these responses to expectancy violations have been critical for understanding early cognition, interpreting them is challenging because infants' responses are highly variable. This variability has been treated as an unavoidable nuisance inherent to infant research. Here we asked whether the variability contains signal in addition to noise: namely, whether some infants show consistently stronger responses to expectancy violations than others. Infants watched two unrelated physical events 6 mo apart; these events culminated in either an impossible or an expected outcome. We found that infants who exhibited the strongest looking response to an impossible event at 11 mo also exhibited the strongest response to an entirely different impossible event at 17 mo. Furthermore, violation-of-expectation responses in infancy predicted children's explanation-based curiosity at 3 y old. In contrast, there was no longitudinal relation between infants' responses to events with expected outcomes at 11 and 17 mo, nor any link with later curiosity; hence, infants' responses do not merely reflect individual differences in attention but are specific to expectancy violations. Some children are better than others at detecting prediction errors-a trait that may be linked to later cognitive abilities.

Measuring Spontaneous Focus on Space in Preschool Children.

Previous work on children's Spontaneous Focus on Numerosity (SFON) has shown the value of measuring children's spontaneous attention within naturalistic interactions. SFON is the spontaneous tendency to focus attention on, and explicitly enumerate the exact number of, items in a set. This measure predicts later math skills above and beyond general IQ and other cognitive factors such as attention. The utility of SFON suggests that a parallel construct for space is a worthy pursuit; spatial cognition underlies many of our mathematical skills, especially as children are first learning these skills. We developed a measure of children's Spontaneous Focus on Space - the spontaneous tendency to attend to absolute and relative spatial components of the environment - and studied its relation to reasoning about the important spatial-numerical concept of proportions. Fifty-five 3- to 6-year-olds were tested at a local children's museums in New York City. Children participated in tasks designed to measure their spontaneous focus on space and number, and their ability to reason about spatial proportions. Results indicate that as children grow older, their Spontaneous Focus on Space becomes more complete and is positively related to proportional reasoning performance. These findings suggest that spatial awareness is rapidly increasing in the preschool years, alongside numerical awareness and spatial-numerical proportional reasoning.

Number prompts left-to-right spatial mapping in toddlerhood.

Toddlers performed a spatial mapping task in which they were required to learn the location of a hidden object in a vertical array and then transpose this location information 90° to a horizontal array. During the vertical training, they were given (a) no labels, (b) alphabetical labels, or (c) numerical labels for each potential spatial location. After the array was transposed to become a horizontal continuum, the children who were provided with numerical labels during training and those who heard alphabetical labels and formed a strong memory for the vertical location, selectively chose the location corresponding to a left-to-right mapping bias. Children who received no concurrent ordinal labels during training were not able to transpose the array, and did not exhibit any spatial directionality bias after transposition. These results indicate that children exhibit more flexible spatial mapping than other animals, and this mapping is modulated depending on the type of concurrent ordinal information the child receives. (PsycINFO Database Record

Encouraging Spatial Talk: Using Children's Museums to Bolster Spatial Reasoning.

Longitudinal spatial language intervention studies have shown that greater exposure to spatial language improves children's performance on spatial tasks. Can short naturalistic, spatial language interactions also evoke improved spatial performance? In this study, parents were asked to interact with their child at a block wall exhibit in a children's museum. Some parents were instructed to emphasize formal shape terms, others to emphasize spatial goals, and some were not provided scripts. Children were presented with a series of spatial reasoning tasks before and after this parental interaction, and the amount and type of spatial language during the training session was coded for parents and children. We found that (a) parents significantly increased their spatial language use when prompted, (b) children and parents used different types of spatial language in each of the scripted conditions, and