Given the overwhelming quantity of information available from the environment, how do young learners know what to learn about and what to ignore? We found that 11-month-old infants (N = 110) used violations of prior expectations as special opportunities for learning. The infants were shown events that violated expectations about object behavior or events that were nearly identical but did not violate expectations. The sight of an object that violated expectations enhanced learning and promoted information-seeking behaviors; specifically, infants learned more effectively about objects that committed violations, explored those objects more, and engaged in hypothesis-testing behaviors that reflected the particular kind of violation seen. Thus, early in life, expectancy violations offer a wedge into the problem of what to learn.

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.

Throughout their first year, infants adeptly detect statistical structure in their environment. However, little is known about whether statistical learning is a primary mechanism for event segmentation. This study directly tests whether statistical learning alone is sufficient to segment continuous events. Twenty-eight 7- to 9-month-old infants viewed a sequence of continuous actions performed by a novel agent in which there were no transitional movements that could have constrained the possible upcoming actions. At test, infants distinguished statistically intact units from less predictable ones. The ability to segment events using statistical structure may help infants discover other cues to event boundaries, such as intentions, and carve up the world of continuous motion in meaningful ways.

Research on cognitive development has revealed that even the youngest minds detect and respond to events that adults find surprising. These surprise responses suggest that infants have a basic set of “core” expectations about the world that are shared with adults and other species. However, little work has asked what purpose these surprise responses serve. Here we discuss recent evidence that violations of core knowledge offer special opportunities for learning. Infants and young children make predictions about the world on the basis of their core knowledge of objects, quantities, and social entities. We argue that when these predictions fail to match the observed data, infants and children experience an enhanced drive to seek and retain new information. This impact of surprise on learning is not equipotent. Instead, it is directed to entities that are relevant to the surprise itself; this drive propels children – even infants – to form and test new hypotheses about surprising aspects of the world. We briefly consider similarities and differences between these recent findings with infants and children on the one hand, and findings on prediction errors in humans and non-human animals on the other. These comparisons raise open questions that require continued inquiry, but suggest that considering phenomena across species, ages, kinds of surprise, and types of learning will ultimately help to clarify how surprise shapes thought.

This study probes how individual differences in early event perception predict later verb knowledge. At Time 1, when infants were 13 to 15months of age, they saw videotaped silent scenes performed by a human actor. The goal was to see whether infants could form categories of path (a figure's trajectory with respect to a ground object) and manner (how an action is performed). Infants either saw the same manner (e.g., jogging) taking place across three different paths (around, through, and behind) or saw the same path (e.g., around a tent) taking place across three different manners (running, crawling, and walking). After familiarization, either the path or the manner was changed and visual fixation was monitored using preferential looking. At Time 2, the same children were tested on their comprehension of verbs in a two-choice pointing task showing two simultaneous actions (e.g., running vs. jumping). Success at categorization of path and manner at Time 1 predicted verb comprehension at Time 2, even when taking language knowledge at both time points into account. These preliminary results represent headway in identifying the factors that may contribute to children's language learning. They suggest that skill in categorizing semantic components present in nonlinguistic events is predictive of children's later verb vocabulary.