Observing the unexpected enhances infants’ learning and exploration

By Aimee E. Stahl, Lisa Feigenson. 2015

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Learning when and what to learn Infants use “unexpectedness” as a cue for learning. Stahl and Feigenson studied how babies reacted when objects behaved in surprising ways (see the Perspective by Schulz). Babies who saw apparently solid and weighty objects moving through a wall or past the edge of a table without falling looked intently at them. When given the opportunity to explore these peculiar objects, they did so by banging them on the floor—as if to test their solidity—or dropping them—as if to test their weightiness. Science, this issue p. 91; see also p. 42 Early in life, violations of core expectations provide a special opportunity for improved learning. [Also see Perspective by Schulz] Given the overwhelming quantity of information available from the environment, how do young learners know what to learn about and what to ignore? We found that 11-month-old infants (N = 110) used violations of prior expectations as special opportunities for learning. The infants were shown events that violated expectations about object behavior or events that were nearly identical but did not violate expectations. The sight of an object that violated expectations enhanced learning and promoted information-seeking behaviors; specifically, infants learned more effectively about objects that committed violations, explored those objects more, and engaged in hypothesis-testing behaviors that reflected the particular kind of violation seen. Thus, early in life, expectancy violations offer a wedge into the problem of what to learn.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Science Is Awe-Some: The Emotional Antecedents of Science Learning (2017, background): “Infants who observe physically impossible events, like one object seemingly passing through another, remember the attributes of the objects involved in those events better than infants who observe perceptually similar, yet physically ordinary, events (Stahl & Feigenson, 2015).”
Explanation-seeking curiosity in childhood (2020, background): “Infants preferentially explore objects that violate their expectations, whether those expectations are formed on the basis of core knowledge [27], inferred rules [40], or probabilistic information [41,42].”
Intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and learning: Theory and applications in educational technologies. (2016, background): “In this view (Kang et al., 2009; Stahl and Feigenson, 2015), learning in itself does not have consequences on state curiosity and motivation.”
Oscillatory entrainment to our early social or physical environment and the emergence of volitional control (2022, result): “(Of note, it remains unclear what the implications of this approach are for other studies that have shown unexpected targets to associate with superior learning, as these appear in some ways to be contradictory (Stahl and Feigenson, 2015).)”