TY - JOUR
T1 - Young infants view physically possible support events as unexpected
T2 - New evidence for rule learning
AU - Wang, Su hua
AU - Zhang, Yu
AU - Baillargeon, Renée
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a Special Research Grant from the Committee of Research of UCSC to the first author and by a grant from NICHD ( HD-21104 ) to the third author. We thank the research staff at the UCSC Baby Lab and the UIUC Infant Cognition Lab for their help with the data collection and analyses, and the parents and infants who participated in the research.
PY - 2016/12/1
Y1 - 2016/12/1
N2 - It has been suggested that one of the mechanisms by which infants acquire their physical knowledge is rule learning: Infants generate rules about the likely outcomes of events and revise these rules when confronted with discrepant outcomes. This approach predicts that when infants’ rules are only partially correct, they will view as unexpected events that are physically possible and even ordinary but happen to contradict their faulty rules. Here we provide evidence for this prediction in young infants’ responses to support events. According to prior findings, by 6.5 months of age, most infants expect an object to be stable if released with half or more of its bottom surface on a support; by 8 months, most infants have refined this rule and realize that an object can be stable with less support as long as the middle of the object's bottom surface is supported. In line with these findings, 7.5- but not 8.5-month-olds viewed as unexpected a possible event in which a wide box remained stable when released with only the middle third of its bottom surface resting on a narrow platform. These results provide new evidence that young infants, like older children and adults, generate and revise rules to make sense of physical events.
AB - It has been suggested that one of the mechanisms by which infants acquire their physical knowledge is rule learning: Infants generate rules about the likely outcomes of events and revise these rules when confronted with discrepant outcomes. This approach predicts that when infants’ rules are only partially correct, they will view as unexpected events that are physically possible and even ordinary but happen to contradict their faulty rules. Here we provide evidence for this prediction in young infants’ responses to support events. According to prior findings, by 6.5 months of age, most infants expect an object to be stable if released with half or more of its bottom surface on a support; by 8 months, most infants have refined this rule and realize that an object can be stable with less support as long as the middle of the object's bottom surface is supported. In line with these findings, 7.5- but not 8.5-month-olds viewed as unexpected a possible event in which a wide box remained stable when released with only the middle third of its bottom surface resting on a narrow platform. These results provide new evidence that young infants, like older children and adults, generate and revise rules to make sense of physical events.
KW - Expectation violation
KW - Infant cognition
KW - Physical reasoning
KW - Rule learning
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.08.021
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.08.021
M3 - Article
C2 - 27599219
AN - SCOPUS:84985023562
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 157
SP - 100
EP - 105
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
ER -