ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Stable individual differences in infants' responses to violations of intuitive physics.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Individual Differences in Infants' Curiosity Are Linked to Cognitive Capacity in Early Childhood.Developmental science · 2026Article
- The Cognitive Architecture of Infant Attachment.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Review
- The role of action concepts in physical reasoning: insights from late childhood.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Curiosity: primate neural circuits for novelty and information seeking.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2024Review
- Trend judgment as a perceptual building block of graphicacy and mathematics, across age, education, and culture.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The use of gaze to study cognition: limitations, solutions, and applications to animal welfare.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Exploring individual differences in infants' looking preferences for impossible events: The Early Multidimensional Curiosity Scale.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
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