Expectancy violations promote learning in young children

Abstract

Children, including infants, have expectations about the world around them, and produce reliable responses when these expectations are violated. However, little is known about how such expectancy violations affect subsequent cognition. Here we tested the hypothesis that violations of expectation enhance children’s learning. In four experiments we compared 3- to 6-year-old children’s ability to learn novel words in situations that defied versus accorded with their core knowledge of object behavior. In Experiments 1 and 2 we taught children novel words following one of two types of events. One event violated expectations about the spatiotemporal or featural properties of objects (e.g., an object appeared to magically change locations). The other event was almost identical, but did not violate expectations (e.g., an object was visibly moved from one location to another). In both experiments we found that children robustly learned when taught after the surprising event, but not following the expected event. In Experiment 3 we ruled out two alternative explanations for our results. Finally, in Experiment 4, we asked whether surprise affects children’s learning in a targeted or a diffuse way. We found that surprise only enhanced children’s learning about the entity that had behaved surprisingly, and not about unrelated objects. Together, these experiments show that core knowledge – and violations of expectations generated by core knowledge – shapes new learning.

Predictable Events Enhance Word Learning in Toddlers

“…Our findings appear to be inconsistent with recent research demonstrating that violations of expectations support novel learning in infants and children [27, 28] and with proposals suggesting that violations of expectations play an important role in acquiring novel regularities [11, 29–33]. One possibility for this inconsistency is that predictability and violations of predictions may have different effects on learning because they elicit different responses.…”

“…If novel information is presented shortly after a predictable event, as in the current study, learning may benefit because the predictable events cause an immediate response that heightens attention [8]. The benefits of learning from violations of expectations may not be seen until later, when the system has taken time to interpret the event as a prediction error, signaling the need to further explore the unexpected situation [8, 27, 28]. Another important factor to consider is the manner in which predictability is manipulated.…”

“…In the current studies, predictability was not an aspect of the objects themselves but was instead reflected in the sequence within which label-object pairs occurred. In studies in which predictability was implemented via violations of expectations, the objects themselves behaved in highly unexpected ways (e.g., hanging in the air, traveling through barriers [27, 28]). Both the nature of the violations (event sequences within which objects are embedded versus the objects’ properties themselves) and the severity of the violations (disruption of a recently learned sequence versus core knowledge) may impact the directionality of the effect.…”

Look again: Pedagogical demonstration facilitates children's use of counterevidence

“…Recent research has shown that young children are sensitive to when evidence presents a stark conflict with their expectations, and selectively explore to resolve those inconsistencies (Legare, 2012;Legare, Wellman, & Gelman, 2010;Stahl & Feigenson, 2015, 2017. The current research focuses on whether, in cases where a conflict may be easily overlooked or dismissed, pedagogical demonstration of conflicting evidence may facilitate children's ability to use it to revise their beliefs.…”

“…Specifically, we note that previous research has largely overlooked the issue of what leads children to recognize that a conflict is relevant to their ongoing process of hypothesis formation and revision, and that they ought to Pedagogy and counterevidence 8 search for additional evidence that might help them resolve that conflict. In prior work, the conflicts have been quite stark, either because the evidence conflicted with children's intuitive conceptions of the physical world (Bonawitz et al, 2012;Stahl & Feigenson, 2015, 2017, or because the initial rule was explicitly taught and conflict was made vivid through deliberate demonstration or prompts for explanation (Legare, 2012;Legare et al, 2010).But in many cases, evidence may not present such a stark conflict. Clearly evidence that conflicts with the laws of the natural world is rare.…”