Login / Signup

Expecting the Unexpected: Infants Use Others' Surprise to Revise Their Own Expectations.

Yang WuMegan MerrickHyowon Gweon
Published in: Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science (2024)
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.
Keyphrases
  • poor prognosis
  • endothelial cells
  • binding protein
  • healthcare
  • mental health
  • transcription factor
  • induced pluripotent stem cells