The violation-of-expectation paradigm: A conceptual overview.

Abstract

For over 35 years, the violation-of-expectation paradigm has been used to study the development of expectations in the first 3 years of life. A wide range of expectations has been examined, including physical, psychological, sociomoral, biological, numerical, statistical, probabilistic, and linguistic expectations. Surprisingly, despite the paradigm's widespread use and the many seminal findings it has contributed to psychological science, so far no one has tried to provide a detailed and in-depth conceptual overview of the paradigm. Here, we attempted to do just that. We first focus on the rationale of the paradigm and discuss how it has evolved over time. We then show how improved descriptions of infants' looking behavior, together with the addition of a rich panoply of brain and behavioral measures, have helped deepen our understanding of infants' responses to violations. Next, we review the paradigm's strengths and limitations. Finally, we end with a discussion of challenges that have been leveled against the paradigm over the years. Through it all, our goal was twofold. First, we sought to provide psychologists and other scientists interested in the paradigm with an informed and constructive analysis of its theoretical origins and development. Second, we wanted to take stock of what the paradigm has revealed to date about how infants reason about events, and about how surprise at unexpected events, in or out of the laboratory, can lead to learning, by prompting infants to revise their working model of the world.

Naive psychology depends on naive physics

“…They recognize agents' intentions and goals, looking longer when agents change their goals or act inefficiently Luo & Baillargeon, 2005;Woodward, 1998). For reviews and meta-analyses of this literature, see: Carey (2009); Kunin et al (2023); Liu and Almeida (2023); Margoni et al (2023);. These expectations persist throughout our lives, guiding the judgments, predictions, and explanations of adults (Gao et al, 2009;Scholl, 2001;Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000;Shu et al, 2021;Smith et al, 2020).…”

Better in sync: Temporal dynamics explain multisensory word‐action‐object learning in early development

“…Increased looking toward the object associated with the word or the action cue is interpreted as evidence of infants having learned the word-object or actionobject association, see Table 1. Given limited evidence of learning in the preferential looking task in Eiteljörge et al ( 2019), we also included a VoE task (see Margoni et al, 2023 for a recent review) following the preferential looking task. Here, children were presented with matching trials where they were shown an object paired with a corresponding word or action cue that they had seen during training.…”

Stimulus and expectation-driven novelty independently guide infant looking behaviour: a systematic review and meta-analysis

“…an agent behaves inefficiently) relative to visually similar but expected events [1][2][3] . Longer looking at these surprising events, or the violation-of-expectation (VOE) effect, is taken as evidence for a hypothesised expectation held in infants' minds 4 : e.g. that unsupported objects fall, and that agents tend to act efficiently [5][6][7][8] .…”