SynthesisNature human behaviour2024
Perceptual and conceptual novelty independently guide infant looking behaviour: a systematic review and meta-analysis.
Synthesis in Nature human behaviour, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 4 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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Introduction of a Novel Toy Changes the Contingent Dynamics of Infant-Caregiver Joint Exploration.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Infants' spontaneous movements explore arm dynamics.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Infants make moral character inferences in multi-agent social interactions.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Active control over exploration improves memory in toddlers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Human infants are born with their eyes open and an otherwise limited motor repertoire; thus, studies measuring infant looking are commonly used to investigate the developmental origins of perception and cognition. However, scholars have long expressed concerns about the reliability and interpretation of looking behaviours. We evaluated these concerns using a pre-registered ( https://osf.io/jghc3 ), systematic meta-analysis of 76 published and unpublished studies of infants' early physical and psychological reasoning (total n = 1,899; 3- to 12-month-old infants; database search and call for unpublished studies conducted July to August 2022). We studied two effects in the same datasets: looking towards expected versus unexpected events (violation of expectation (VOE)) and looking towards visually familiar versus visually novel events (perceptual novelty (PN)). Most studies implemented methods to minimize the risk of bias (for example, ensuring that experimenters were naive to the conditions and reporting inter-rater reliability). There was mixed evidence about publication bias for the VOE effect. Most centrally to our research aims, we found that these two effects varied systematically-with roughly equal effect sizes (VOE, standardized mean difference 0.290 and 95% confidence interval (0.208, 0.372); PN, standardized mean difference 0.239 and 95% confidence interval (0.109, 0.369))-but independently, based on different predictors. Age predicted infants' looking responses to unexpected events, but not visually novel events. Habituation predicted infants' looking responses to visually novel events, but not unexpected events. From these findings, we suggest that conceptual and perceptual novelty independently influence infants' looking behaviour.
Indexed as
Identifiers
39402259What OpenQuestion holds
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.