Longitudinal spatial language intervention studies have shown that greater exposure to spatial language improves children's performance on spatial tasks. Can short naturalistic, spatial language interactions also evoke improved spatial performance? In this study, parents were asked to interact with their child at a block wall exhibit in a children's museum. Some parents were instructed to emphasize formal shape terms, others to emphasize spatial goals, and some were not provided scripts. Children were presented with a series of spatial reasoning tasks before and after this parental interaction, and the amount and type of spatial language during the training session was coded for parents and children. We found that (a) parents significantly increased their spatial language use when prompted, (b) children and parents used different types of spatial language in each of the scripted conditions, and (c) children's spatial language during the interaction, and not parents', predicts children's subsequent improved puzzle performance.

Infants look longer at impossible or unlikely events than at possible events. While these responses to expectancy violations have been critical for understanding early cognition, interpreting them is challenging because infants’ responses are highly variable. This variability has been treated as an unavoidable nuisance inherent to infant research. Here we asked whether the variability contains signal in addition to noise: namely, whether some infants show consistently stronger responses to expectancy violations than others. Infants watched two unrelated physical events 6 mo apart; these events culminated in either an impossible or an expected outcome. We found that infants who exhibited the strongest looking response to an impossible event at 11 mo also exhibited the strongest response to an entirely different impossible event at 17 mo. Furthermore, violation-of-expectation responses in infancy predicted children’s explanation-based curiosity at 3 y old. In contrast, there was no longitudinal relation between infants’ responses to events with expected outcomes at 11 and 17 mo, nor any link with later curiosity; hence, infants’ responses do not merely reflect individual differences in attention but are specific to expectancy violations. Some children are better than others at detecting prediction errors—a trait that may be linked to later cognitive abilities.

Infants look longer and explore more following violations-of-expectation, but the reasons for these surprise-induced behaviors are unclear. One possibility is that expectancy violations increase arousal generally, thereby increasing infants’ post-surprise activity. Another possibility is that infants’ exploration reflects the search for an explanation for the surprising event. We tested these alternatives in three experiments. First in Experiment 1 we confirmed that seeing an object violate expectations (by passing through a solid wall) increased infants’ exploration of the surprising object compared to a novel object, and compared to when no expectancy violation was seen. Then in Experiment 2 we measured infants’ exploration after they saw the same violation event, but then an explanation for the event was provided (the wall was revealed to have a large hole in it). We found that providing this explanation abolished infants’ surprise-induced exploration. Furthermore, the longer infants looked at the explanation, the greater their reversal in exploratory preference (i.e., the more they ignored the surprising object and explored the novel object). In Experiment 3 we replicated these effects. These findings demonstrate that preverbal infants both seek and recognize explanations for surprising events.

Infants in laboratory settings look longer at impossible than possible events, learn better about objects that behave surprisingly, and match people’s utterances to the objects that likely elicited them. The paradigms that reveal these behaviors have become cornerstones of research on preverbal cognition. But less is known about whether these canonical behaviors generalize in naturalistic environments. Here we describe a series of online protocols that replicate classic laboratory findings, detailing our methods throughout. In Experiment 1, we found that 15-month-olds (N = 24) looked longer at an online impossible support event (an object appearing to defy gravity) than a possible support event. These infants did not, however, show the same success with an online solidity event. In Experiment 2, we found that 15-month-olds (N = 24) showed surprise-induced learning online—they were better able to learn a label for a novel object when the object had just behaved unexpectedly. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that 16-month-olds (N = 20) who heard a valenced utterance (“Yum!”) showed preferential looking to the object most likely to have generated that utterance. Together, these results suggest that, with some adjustments, testing infants online is a feasible and promising approach for cognitive development research.