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Abstract Human infants show systematic responses to events that violate their expectations. Can they also revise these expectations based on others’ expressions of surprise? Here we ask whether infants (N = 156, mean = 15.2 months, range: 12.0–18.0 months) can use an experimenter’s expression of surprise to revise their own expectations about statistically probable vs. improbable events. An experimenter sampled a ball from a box of red and white balls and briefly displayed either a surprised or an unsurprised expression at the outcome before revealing it to the infant. Following an unsurprised expression, the results were consistent with prior work; infants looked longer at a statistically improbable outcome than a probable outcome. Following a surprised expression, however, this standard pattern disappeared or was even reversed. These results suggest that even before infants can observe the unexpected events themselves, they can use others’ surprise to expect the unexpected. Starting early in life, human learners can leverage social information that signals others’ prediction error to update their own predictions.
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Young children distinguish the impossible from the merely improbable
From infancy, children show heightened interest in events that are impossible or improbable, relative to likely events. Do young children represent impossible and improbable events as points on a continuum of possibility, or do they instead treat them as categorically distinct? Here, we compared 2- and 3-y-old children’s learning (N = 335) following nearly identical events that were equi-probable, improbable, or impossible. We found that children learned significantly better following impossible than possible events, no matter how unlikely. We conclude that young children distinguish between the impossible and the merely improbable.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2044433
- PAR ID:
- 10657278
- Publisher / Repository:
- National Academy of Sciences
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Volume:
- 121
- Issue:
- 46
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2411297121
