Cognitive Consequences of Surprise and Explanation-Seeking in Early Development

Decades of research find that young children look longer at surprising events than expected ones, and more recent work finds that these surprising events—ones that violate children’s expectations of the world around them—also motivate children’s exploration and enhance their learning. The research in this dissertation seeks to characterize the nature of expectancy violations on early cognition. First, in Chapter 2, I ask why expectancy violations trigger infants to explore. In a series of three experiments, I show that infants are searching for explanations for surprising events, such that finding a plausible explanation abolishes surprise-induced exploration. Next, in Chapter 3, I ask whether there are individual differences in infants’ responses to surprising events. I find that surprise affects individuals differently: some infants show strong violation-of-expectations responses whereas others show weaker responses, consistently over development. In addition, some infants show greater interest in potential explanations for surprising events whereas others show weaker interest—an effect again observed consistently over development. Further, I offer some suggestive evidence that these early individual differences predict aspects of cognition years later. In Chapter 4, I explore the temporal dynamics of surprise-induced exploration. I find that for infants, events are not represented as surprising unless there is an initial violation-of-expectation. Although infants can use information presented after a surprising event to retrospectively construe that event as expected (Chapter 2), they fail to do the reverse: use information to retrospectively construe an initially expected event as surprising. It is not until late in the preschool years that children robustly exhibit this ability. Finally, in Chapter 5 I ask whether expectations in domains other than that of physical objects can support surprise-induced learning. Results from two experiments suggest that infants learn better when social agents behave as expected, a direct contrast to the findings that infants learn better when physical objects behave in ways that defy expectations. Together, the studies in this dissertation highlight the importance of predictions as a motivator for learning and explanation from early in human life