Making Sense of Infants’ Differential Responses to Incongruity

Abstract

Infants show strikingly different reactions to incongruity: looking or smiling. The former occurs in response to magical events and the latter to humorous events. We argue that these reactions depend largely on the respective experimental methodologies employed, including the popular violation of expectation (VOE) paradigm. Although both types of studies involve infants’ reactions to incongruity, their literatures have yet to confront each other, and researchers in each domain are drawing strikingly different conclusions regarding infants’ understanding of the world. Here, we argue that infants are sensitive to and constrained by several contextual differences in the methodologies employed by incongruity researchers that afford one or the other reaction. We apply De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s participatory sense-making framework to further understand what infants are sensitive to in these paradigms. Understanding infants’ reactions to incongruity (i.e., VOE) is necessary to clear up claims regarding the sophistication of their knowledge of physical and social phenomena. Attention to several simple methodological details is recommended.

Great expectations: The construct validity of the violation‐of‐expectation method for studying infant cognition

“…Taken together, this convergent evidence corroborates the interpretation that infants differentially respond in VOE tasks because they detected something unexpected – that is, VOE methods measure infants' expectations, and therefore can yield insights into infants' cognitive capacities. Of course, we do not argue that violations of expectation are the only reason infants would differentially respond to an event (e.g., see Aslin, 2007; Bremner & Dunn, 2020; Mireault & Reddy, 2020). Instead, we note the wealth of converging evidence that validates the range of dependent measures commonly used in VOE studies, including looking time, active exploration and anticipatory measures, and neurophysiological measures.…”