ArticleCommunications psychology2024
Infants evaluate informativeness of evidence and predict causal events as revealed in theta oscillations and predictive looking.
Article in Communications psychology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Infants and Mobiles: Developing an Understanding of Cause and Effect.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Neural responses to state curiosity in young children.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- A two-person neuroscience perspective on parent-infant dyadic expansion of consciousness.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Theta activity as a marker of cognitive development in infancy: A longitudinal study across the first two years of life.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Prosodic Cues Support Inferences About the Question's Pedagogical Intent.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This study investigates 16-month-old infants' sensitivity to the informativeness of evidence and its potential link to infants' ability to draw accurate causal inferences and predict unfolding events. Employing concurrent EEG and eye tracking, data from 66 infants revealed significantly increased theta oscillatory activity when infants expected to see causally unconfounded evidence compared to confounded evidence, suggesting heightened cognitive engagement in anticipation of informative evidence. Crucially, this difference was more pronounced in the subset of infants who later made correct predictions, suggesting that they had correctly inferred the causal structure based on the evidence presented. This research sheds light on infants' motivation to seek explanatory causal information, suggesting that even at 16 months, infants can strategically direct attention to situations conducive to acquiring informative evidence, potentially laying the groundwork for the impressive abilities of humans to rapidly acquire knowledge and develop causal theories of the world.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.