Manipulating Infants' Expectations About Physical Events: Evidence From Priming and Teaching Experiments

93 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003.Two series of violation-of-expectation experiments are reported in this thesis that attempted to enhance infants' ability to incorporate height information when reasoning about covering events. One line of the experiments (Experiments 1 to 2) adopted a priming paradigm using a preceding event (i.e., an occlusion event) to cue infants to attend to height information in a subsequent event (i.e., a covering event). After seeing an occlusion event in which a cover was moved to the front of an object, 8- to 8.5-month-old infants were induced to include information about relative heights of the cover and object in their physical representation of a subsequent, covering event. The infants succeeded in detecting a violation when a tall object became fully hidden under a short cover, indicated by their increased attention to this event. The other line of the experiments (Experiments 3 to 7) used a teaching paradigm. Nine-month-old infants were presented with covering events (1) that included contrastive outcomes for the variable height, (2) that made it easy for the infants to compare the relative heights of the cover and object, and (3) that allowed the infants to build a casual explanation for the data observed. Next, the infants were presented with two test events, immediately or 24 hours after the teaching session. The results suggested that the teaching events helped 9-month-old infants identify a new variable for covering events. New research directions suggested by these results are also described.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD